I have three WD 150gb Raptor hard disks in my computer.  One has XP, one has Vista 32 bit, and the third is extra.  My machine is dual boot on startup, but defaults to Vista in 12 seconds.  I want to pull the third unused Raptor and replace it with a Patriot Extreme Flash Torqx 128gb SSD drive and install Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit on it.  I want to make the machine triple boot until I migrate everything from the Vista drive over to the 7 drive, including all the hardware.  I will then pull the Vista Raptor drive as well.

This is a dumb question, but how do I know which Raptor is the unused one?  I can follow the cables to the sata plug on the motherboard, but I cannot find anything that tells me before I shut down what drive is plugged into what plug.  Do I have to pull one at a time, reassemble, and reboot?  Or is there another way?  Finally, is there anything special about setting up a triple boot machine?  I know the oldest OS must be installed first and I have done that.

To the OBC'er who identifies the best way to solve this I will send the unused 150gb Raptor to!


Edited by Hagar - January 16 2010 at 9:26pm

sata, now someone more in the know may be able to correct me but, with older ide connections generally the first inline is the first drive used and jumper is set to master since systems generally prefer the first inline connection this way.
with sata it could be a similar situation. first second etc, numeric assignment
might be the way the sys reads the drives.
primary connection to mainboard 1st and second drives recognized as C: main, and third in series as the secondary.
didnt acutally build my last sys which was sata so couldnt say with 100% certainty.

Edited by Vindictive - January 18 2010 at 12:23am

The easiest way is really going to be pulling them one at a time and trying a boot. The only thing I hope didn't happen is that the boot sector ended up on the spare drive. 

Yup.  I pulled each manually and attached a SATA to USB device and checked it with my laptop.  Of the 3 Raptors, the last one I pulled, was, of course, the one I wanted!

I got Windows 7 Professional in exchange for 1.5 hours at Microsoft.  I will put it on an SSD drive (64 Bit version) and see what happens!  Then migrate all my Vista 32bit apps and hardware over to it.  If it all works, I will pull the Vista drive (another Raptor) and offer that to an OBCer when the time comes.

I am curious to see what hardware problems I will have.