[Closed] Question about hard drives and bootloaders

1)Yes. GRUB on Linux installs will do this for you routinely at setup.
2)Depends on the OS, and what file systems it knows about, but usually yes. Will be trickier to not mount it on the second disk if there's an OS there.

Both will be Windows.

Plan is for the second drive to be for personal use, but I could also kep part of it for backing up the work drive. Ideally, I'd like to be able to keep the second drive unmounted and only mount it when I want to back up.. so that any viruses etc can't munch through it.

But then there's encryption to think about cos work are fussy like that.

The Win installer (XP and 7) seems to look for existing installs and update the bootloader, so you should be fine. I dont know about 8.

Bit intrigued with this: "but not mount it on the second OS?"

If the second OS is going on the second HD, then I think some fiddling in the second OS to ignore the partition on the second disk would be in order. I think the Disk Management console would handle this.

Oh.. just found out you can run vmware to run a vm from a partition.. so you could in theory either reboot to run the second OS or just start it as a VM!

Although that probably wouldn't work too well, the OS would thinkthe hardware had changed a lot...

Genuinely interested here. What benefit would this have over just setting up a new user account, using that for work and backing up to a new internal drive/nas/cloud storage?

I've not done it with modern versions, but I expect you'd have to install the second OS and then have at it with BCDedit to add the first OS back in.

Genuinely interested here. What benefit would this have over just setting up a new user account, using that for work

I wouldn't feel comfortable installing games and messing about with the work machine.