its really simple open the side case. slide out one of the empty drive holders. put the new drive into the holder slide it back into the drive bay hook up the SATA power and data cable.

Boot the  compute. Press the F2 key as soon as you see the big Dell splash screen to enter the bios. Scroll down to the drives section and enable the SATA port that you connected the new drive to.

Boot into window. Right click on my computer icon, select manage, in the managemnet window select disk management. In the disk screen in the lower half of the window click on the new drive. right click on the partition image and select format. Follow the prompts.

To Dual boot just pop you win 7 disk into the system at boot this time press the F12 key at the Dell splash screen. At the boot menu select the option to boot from the onboard CD rom. Press enter then any key. The System will then boot up from the win 7 disk. Be sure to select the correct disk to install Win 7 on.

You will need to fix the boot loader to recgonize the  XP drive. use a progrm like Easy BCD  

Once you have it fixed every time you boot up you will be presented with a screen to select which OS you want to boot into.

UDNS_Eric

See if THIS 

<ADMIN NOTE: Broken link has been removed from this post by Dell>

can help.

Bev.

Davet50 was "right on" in suggesting the use of EasyBCD.  I am using it to boot between XP, Vista and Linux. 

The best source I have found for dual booting is The definitive dual-booting guide: Windows 7, Linux, Vista and XP step-by-step.  It has lots of good information and details instructions for how to dual boot various OS combinations.  While this article assuming you are going to add the second OS to the same hard drive, much of the info is also applicable to installing each OS on a different drive.

Hope this helps ...

Thanks everybody! I appreciate the input and help.

Hi Dave,

So, I just popped the Win 7 DVD and booted from it. When I tried to do a custom install onto the partition I created on my second drive, I got an error message to the effect of the BIO does not allow booting from that second partition.

Now, I will say that I did create the 250GB parition on the second drive with Acronis Disk Direction Suite 10, as a Primary,Active partition type. Was this a mistake? I am running the most current BIO available for my XPS 720, which is version A06.

Any ideas?

Eric

Did you make that partition a simple volume and then format it? There is no reason it should not boot the disk from any partition. You select the partion to install the OS on after is loads the setup files.

Also why are you choosing custom install? You should be just doing a full clean install.

Hey Dave,

What I meant by a Custom install was a full clean install (the only other option outside of Upgrade). So, I just right clicked My Computer, selected Manage, and under Storage>Disk Management, Disk 1 (the second hard driver), Volume H (how the OS recognizes the 250 GB partition I created on the second drive, as being a Simple, Basic and Healthy (Active,Primary Partition).

Hope I did not create that second partition incorrectly.

Eric

Yes that is just what it should say at this point. Now when you boot up the 7 disk it should ask you what partition to install it on, and it should list all your drive partition.

Hi Dave,

yes, the new drive is recognized. What I did to the XP which is sitting on Disk 0, Drive C, is do a clean install of Vista Enterprise to replace XP MCE. That being said, even when opening up My Computer, while booted in Vista, I still see Disk 1, Drive H, showing up in as a recognized partition. I just can't seem to install onto that partition when booted into my Win 7 Enterprise DVD (using the RTM that was available via TechNet, not an illegal torrent copy).

I looked around online and there are others getting the same error message, but primarily when trying to install Vista onto a second drive. Some suggestions range from unplugging the SATA cables to swapping drive bays.

Eric

most perplezxing at the moment. Lets re group and look at the basics..

You added a new harddrive into the system.

        Did you boot into the bios and enable the SATA port to which you connected that drive.

       Boot into the bios and make sure that the drive is recognized and in the proper mode. it should just be in the on setting.

If the drive is shown in the bios then boot into XP and make sure you can access  the drive in window explorer.

Yeah, still not working when booted to the Win 7 DVD install disk. I get the following message when I select the drive:

Windows cannot be installed to this disk. This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enabled in the computer's BIOS menu.

Any suggestions?

Eric

Perhaps it is something in the Enterprise download or code. I only have the RTC Ultimate version of 7 but have had no issues installing any of the builds previously either.

It might be worth a try to disconnect the primary drive and see if you can get it to install. You could alway go back and hook up the Vista drive and using Vista boot pro or such make a new bootloader for dual booting.

Hi Dave,

One last piece of info before I go that route. I went into my BIOS and it does "see" both of my SATA drives, with the Vista being in SATA 0 (DIsk 0 in Device Management) and SATA 1 as Disk 1.

The difference between each SATA drive when being looked at in Setup is that SATA 0 shows as being controlled by the System BIOS whereas there is no similar indication for SATA 1.

As a fallback, I guess I could always install Vista and Windows 7, each on their own seperate partition on SATA 0 (Disk 0) and use two partitions on SATA 1 (Disk 1) as Data partitions for each respective OS.

Your thoughts?

Eric

Hi Dave,

Here's an update for you from a response I got from Dell tech support when I emailed them the error mesage too. This is the response:

"(I) need to install the Intel Matrix Storage Manager driver for Windows 7 in order to get rid of the problem..........My system does not at this time have these available drivers for Windows 7 yet, but Dell is working on them."

So, for the interim, I'll have to put Windows 7 on a seperate partition on Disk 0 and I'll use Disk 1 as a storage for all data associated with both Vista and 7 which will be on Disk 0 in their respective partition.

Eric

You should be able to get that now from the web just use the Vista one. This is very surprising as I mention as all I had to to my system was load the OS and get the video and sound drivers. all other drivers were in the install and yes I did this on a new seperate hd at the moment I have 4 drives in my rig, one Vista, one Win 7, a 1 TB for a backup drive and a 250 gig for misc stuff.