Dual Boot On separate drives. Precautions?

[Brodie]

Hi all,

I realise a similar question has been posted before but mine is of a different nature. I have finally got freenas running exactly the way I want it with htpc, raspbmc and cifs/nfs shares working. So naturally now I want to stuff those up. My freenas has 3 x 2TB hdds and it runs from a usb stick. I would like to install windows on a FOURTH drive (I know partitioning dual boot is a no-no). Now logically I want to keep these systems completely separate with freenas not touching the fourth drive and windows not touching the freenas drives and booting by preference order (freenas will run 99% of the time). I don't have space/money for a second (third) computer so have settled on doing it this way. My concern is that once I boot into windows it may do something strange with the freenas drives and corrupt them. Has anyone had experience with this and/or knows a way to forcefully disable access to the hdds ensuring no data corruption of either freenas or windows (or better yet power them down)? My last option will be physically disconnecting the drives but would certainly rather avoid this if possible for obvious reasons.

A big thanks to everyone on this forum.... I'm extremely new to networking and have learnt a lot and got the system working solely through the responses to many common problems experienced by new users

 

[cyberjock]

Yes, the way to prevent one OS from toying with the other OS's disks is to physically disconnect the disks from the machine. So when you want to boot FreeNAS you attach the FreeNAS disks and unplug the Windows disk, when you want Windows you do the vice-versa.

Obviously, not something we'd ever recommend around here. ;)

 

[Brodie]

Thanks, I did expect that response but was hoping there would be a better way! I may look into a 4 bay hot swappable enclosure with power buttons to avoid having to disconnect as it's in a tight space but don't think this will be cheap (but at least the missus won't know any better unlike building another computer :)) I've only just started her coming around to the idea of how awesome having a freenas server is now that everything is so pretty with xbmc running into the TV