Two "Macintosh HDs" Dual-boot in a single MBP?

[erkanasu]

Hi everyone,

I'm about to install a SSD and place my HD in the optical drive via the optibay method.

My goal is two have two distinct boot drives both with OSX 10.8. I want my SSD to be for business purposes only and my HD to be for personal.

I'm assuming this should be straight forward, but to confirm, will this work?

1) The two Macintosh HD's shouldn't have any issues with each other, right?

2) As for installing 10.8, do I need to load an earlier version on their first and then upgrade my way up to 10.8 or will 10.8 install with no previous version?!?

 

[hfg]

That will work fine. You can select the default startup disk (and switch between them) from SystemPreferences/StartupDisk.

I would probably name them differently (i.e. Macintosh SSD, Macintosh HD).

If you want, you could simply clone your existing hard disk to the SSD (then rename it) to have them start out with the exact same desktop and environment.


-howard

 

[hackerwayne]

Hi everyone,

I'm about to install a SSD and place my HD in the optical drive via the optibay method.

My goal is two have two distinct boot drives both with OSX 10.8. I want my SSD to be for business purposes only and my HD to be for personal.

I'm assuming this should be straight forward, but to confirm, will this work?

1) The two Macintosh HD's shouldn't have any issues with each other, right?

2) As for installing 10.8, do I need to load an earlier version on their first and then upgrade my way up to 10.8 or will 10.8 install with no previous version?!?

They will work fine, hold down Option when you boot the Mac and choose which drive you wanna start up with

 

[erkanasu]

Thanks y'all

 

[Benbikeman]

Yep, I have two hard drives in my MBP, both of which are bootable. In my case it was just after a problem (which turned out to be faulty RAM though it was showing up as an unmountable drive), so that I have the reassurance of being able to boot up the machine even if a drive fails while I'm away from home.

 

[dusk007]

I would probably name them differently (i.e. Macintosh SSD, Macintosh HD).

Naming is key. Otherwise it gets confusing and the position of the Icon sometimes switches around if the partitions are on different drives and they initialize differently.

I have one MacSSD as main boot and a MacHDD as a partial clone for backup in case of SSD failure.
The HDD boots in an eternity though if you are used to the ssd and regularly use both boot paritions. Unless your SSD is really really small, I recommend splitting it up into two partitions and put a BootBusiness and BootPrivate on it.
Better to have the HDD for Data like Movies, Pictures, big Archives, Backups, ...