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Dual Boot questions

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MilesAhead:
VistaBootPro used to be freeware.  Very easy to use.

But multiple OS on a single drive is going to be hairy(if even possible) with GPT etc..  If you dumb everything down to legacy MBR you lose huge HD support.  I'd need to read up on it but my impression is with GPT multiboot means multiple physical drives now.

Easier to just use the drive drawer pattern.

Edit:  Even though I saved some money by having the 486 built for me by a coworker who did builds as a sideline, by the time I added a Toshiba 2x CDROM the cost was around 5 grand.  (The CDROM as standard equipment  was not yet in effect.  I was a 2x early adopter.) So it was worth it to buy books and spend some time to put multiple OS on rather than just buying machines.  I didn't have space for a workbench.  That limited my options as well.

TaoPhoenix:
Wow, I "sorta" got what I wanted, I got a lot of comments, and confirmed that I need an expert on hand whenever I do this!

In some ways it feels a shade simpler than all this, so I'm not sure what I'm missing.

I have an entire second HD that except for a few misc backups, was purposely not used so there's your second "clean drive". Then you/we/techie just flips which is which and loads Win 9 when it comes out later this year.

I think I'm seeing technical drive letter problems, but does that stop everything from loading? Can't you just manually navigate to the old C/User/Desktop/Shortcuts and double click them and let them load? Or do they all break because of that drive letter problem?

My broad goal is to treat the new drive like a semi-fresh primary drive just like a new computer with arguably mixed strong/weak hardware, and the OS will never know and never care. Then limping along a little, I manually can go back and look and say "Oh, I had that and that and that", without guessing or running two whole comps on my desk.

I really tried hard back in '06, to plan for the future, so there's say a 1 in 3 chance the hardware will run Win 9, then you just flip the drives, yay it's a (now slightly aging) Win 9 comp, and off we go.

Does that make sense to anyone?

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