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F*ckDell · Jul 29, 2006, 09:49 PM

Real quick question.

If I have a SATA 10k HDD running OS X and I want to use bootcamp to run XP. Can I load XP onto my 2nd slave 500 GB hard drive?? Sitting around thinking how I'm going to configure my new Mac Pro when they come out and came across that question. Thanks for the help guys.

ghporter · Jul 30, 2006, 10:49 AM

Define "slave drive." As far as I know, any directly connected SATA drive should be visible to Windows. However, it sounds like you're talking about an external drive (which may not be "directly connected" to the machine's SATA controller).

Clarity is important here...

F*ckDell · Jul 30, 2006, 04:47 PM

No I am not talking about an external drive. It's simply a second hard drive. You have your "master" hard drive that runs your OS, then you have a "slave" as your second drive. I decided not to install Win XP on my second slave drive anyway. I'd rather just get a 150gb 10k rpm SATA drive and partition 50gb for Win XP.

ghporter · Jul 30, 2006, 08:49 PM

Master/Slave makes no difference to XP. You can install it to boot from ANY directly connected drive.

External drives don't work because Windows takes over management of USB during the boot process, typically re-enumerating devices and losing context in the process. It doesn't, to my knowledge, inherently see firewire drives during boot so booting from a firewire drive is another problem.

Moose · Jul 30, 2006, 08:51 PM

Apple currently ships no Intel machines that support more than one internal hard disk drive.

msuper69 · Jul 30, 2006, 11:48 PM

Originally Posted by Moose

Apple currently ships no Intel machines that support more than one internal hard disk drive.

Good observation.

What Mac is the OP trying to install XP on?

Wouldn't happen to be a PC, would it?

That would be a no-no on the Macnn forums.

beancurd · Aug 9, 2006, 08:48 AM

Originally Posted by Moose

Apple currently ships no Intel machines that support more than one internal hard disk drive.

They do now, with the Mac Pro. I'm hoping to do what the OP suggested and install XP on a dedicated second hard drive. Do you think this will be possible?

Moose · Aug 9, 2006, 08:58 AM

Originally Posted by beancurd

They do now, with the Mac Pro. I'm hoping to do what the OP suggested and install XP on a dedicated second hard drive. Do you think this will be possible?

Hard to say, but it would be handy.

ghporter · Aug 9, 2006, 10:27 AM

As stated earlier, XP doesn't care what drive it's installed on. As long as the hardware supports it, you can have XP installed on ANY partition that's directly connected to the machine. That means ANY-you can have partitions from C: through Z: and have XP installed on any of them.

The key is XP's "boot.ini" file. It's a text file in the root directory of the first hard drive, and it details which device and partition to look for the Windows boot code (NTdetect.com and ntloader) on. Here's what mine looks like:

[boot loader]
timeout=10
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

It says to wait for ten seconds, and then automatically look for only one operating system ("Microsoft Windows XP Professional") on the first partition of the first IDE drive on the first IDE controller's master channel. Note that there's a line that starts with "default." This is how the machine decides which OS to start by default-and is part of the built in multi-boot capability of XP.