I installed Windows 7 on one hard drive and Windows XP on another hard drive. I want to know how I can select either OS at boot up other than booting into my BIOS and having to select the hard drive that the OS is on. Is there a key that I can press at start up that will allow me to boot into my desired OS without ahving to tell the BIOS which driver to boot to? My mobo is: MSI MS-7816, H87-G43. Im running an Intel i7-4770. Thank you experts.
I don't know what order you installed the OS's, but for best results, it should be XP first and then 7 and the Windows 7 drive should be your boot drive. It's been a long time since I played around with dual booting, but that typically set you up well. If you haven't installed much, it might be better to just start over. However, if not, you need to see what options Windows 7 has listed. Go to the Start Menu and type "msconfig" (no quotes) press the Enter key. Go to the boot tab and see what's listed for booting. Windows 7 will be there, but we need to see if Windows XP is.
Dual booting two OS,s on two different hard drives will give you problems, how big are your hard drives? The best way to do this is to use one hard drive a split the partitions into two drives.. next you will need to install Windows XP first, then Windows 7.. using windows 7 boot manager...
Try EasyBCD, its a good boot manager. http://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/ You could also see this: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/1029-73-dual-booting-windows-separate-hard-drives
