Windows 7 Install Win7 on slave drive or new hard drive on work PC

[James Walton]

Ok, don't know if this has been asked before, but I want to use my work laptop as a PC as well. Here are my two options:

Option 1, install Win 7 on "slave" drive, the HP laptop I have for work has two hard drive bays, and dual boot Win 7 Pro and Win 7 Ultimate.

Option 2, install Win 7 Ultimate on "third" hard drive and just swap the drives when I want to go from work to play.

The hard drive bays are quite easy to get to and remove, our sys admin doesn't know that I have a second drive installed for my files that I have to back up every 6 months. Every 6 months because their idea of problem solving is not fixing the problem, but re-imaging the computer. I don't want to say who I work for and who owns the computer, but I am tired of traveling and taking to laptops with me every time. I will reply to this post later with the exact specs of the HP laptop that is in question. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Mitchell_A]

So if you were to install it on your secondary drive, would your system admin wipe that too? That seems like it would me the most efficient solution if you could manage to back that drive up too.

 

[James Walton]

No, they won't wipe that drive as well, it's a personal hard drive that I keep my work files on, as the network drive for users is only 10 GB, and with some of the PDF's and spreadsheets I use can fill that in a couple of weeks. Will an OS work on a slave drive in a laptop? I know it will work in a tower as I have had Win 7 on main drive and Ubuntu on slave drive. Just trying to cover my bases before I go crazy on a laptop that doesn't belong to me.

 

[Adamsappleone]

Hello James,

to Windows 7 Forums,

Your best option is #2, however, you may run in to a boot issue when putting the drive in your home machine.
Another issue may be the daily removal of that drive, may cut the life span.
I multi-boot, 3 OS's, 3 drives, which works great, but I've never taken the drives out on a daily basis and used in another machine. I have on occasion and they've booted just fine.
Have you thought about using it as a USB, in an enclosure? You would have to change the BIOS setting to enable to boot via USB and that's if your system has that capability.

Hope this helps and keep us posted
Don

 

[Mitchell_A]

You can dual boot through a secondary hard drive on a notebook no problem, it's just like doing it on a desktop. I'd so that as it would be a lot simpler. Used to have a SSD running Windows 8 and a HDD running Windows 7 on my HP dv7.