ThinkPad Serial Hard Drive Bay Adapter III as primary hard drive?

[saschabeltz]

Hello everyone,

my working laptop is a T 400 running on Win XP. I would like to run a Windows 7 installation on a physical hard drive which won't be possible with my employer in the near future.

My idea is now to have a second HD in the Serial Hard Drive Bay Adapter III (let's say the

ThinkPad 320GB 7200 rpm Serial ATA Hard Drive) on which I would install Win 7. I would then configure the bay adapter to be the primary HD to boot from. I would reconfigure the system to use the internal HD everytime I need Win XP together with my other company stuff.

I don't want to install Win 7 just in another partition as I don't want to risk anything happening to the XP machine ;-)

Is the above described scenario valid or do I have to take anything else into consideration?

Thanks in advance!

Sascha

[cassio]

yes you can boot from the ultrabay hdd adapater

[andyP Community SuperMod · Accepted solution]

saschabeltz, welcome to the forum,

as cassio states you can boot from a hdd in the bay adapter. The easiest way to do this, after installing it in the primary drive bay, is to press F12 at boot; this will allow you to choose from which device you want to boot from.

[saschabeltz]

Hello andyP,

thank you :-))

[icarni]

is there an option to do this (pressing F12) by default instead of having to wait for the right second while booting ??

[cassio]

you can probably change the boot sequence in the bios

[icarni]

I am still having probs with this. I run a WinXP system on a primary SSD and wanted to run a 2nd OS (no matter which one I installed) it works only for a while. At a certain point the system doesnt recognize the 2nd OS and says NTLDR not found ...... I understand you cant configure the 2nd system in the slot for the 1st HDD as this wont work (for reasons I dont know). How did you configure the 2nd OS pls? Thanks

[zoltanthegypsy]

Have you tried installing to the 2nd HD while the primary HD is removed?

Win installs usually hijack the XP install's boot loader and replace it with the one used by the 2nd OS (if Vista or 7) so  you end up with no boot loader in the 2nd install.  You get a Windows boot menu @ boot time (windows, not the BIOS f12 menu) and pick the OS there.  Trying to boot the 2nd OS directly fails since that install doesn't have a boot loader.

Installing to the secondary drive w/the primary removed should avoid this, but may leave the 2nd install confused about which drive it is on.  I haven't tried it this way, I use grub as a main boot loader when I have multiple OS/drive installs.

Z.

[icarni]

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zoltanthegypsy wrote:

Have you tried installing to the 2nd HD while the primary HD is removed?

.

Z.

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This is actually what I was going to do next. But here I failed again using an external CD-ROM. Using the Rescue CD it says something like "insert disk 1" and when I insert it it says "not the right CD ...." or something like this. I tried then to install an original Win XP (with the 1st SDD disk not inserted and the 2nd disk inside the bay) but here it didn#t found the HDD in the bay ..... the install routine copied a lot of files but then it doesnt find the HDD to install on ...... Weird .....

[andyP Community SuperMod]

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andyP wrote:,

........after installing it in the primary drive bay..........

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Install the OS on the drive with it in the primary hdd drive slot.

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icami wrote:

Using the Rescue CD it says something like "insert disk 1" and when I insert it it says "not the right CD ...." or something like this.

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Knowing exactly which message you are seeing would help to help you. Is it maybe asking for the supplemental disc? If it is click on "no" and it will then ask for disc 1. Then you're rolling