Three Windows and Linux in one glass

I don’t know how for anyone, but for me personally, a computer is primarily a tool. An extremely convenient, sharpened, high-performance tool, although completely unsightly from the outside, but allowing me to perform any tasks in the shortest time with the best result. Yes, of course, sometimes I use my computer and not for work, for some multimedia and entertainment purposes, but this is rare. If only because it’s more convenient for me to watch movies on TV and sitting on the couch (he finds what he needs on the Internet), I listen to music more in the car or on the radio (on my own radio, with my favorite repertoire). So from purely computer entertainment there is only skype, because of which, in general, all this fuss fired.

There are a lot of computers in my house. One, two, three .... seven. Seven pieces right now. All workers, all good, go turn it on and use it. Four of mine, one with my wife, two with my daughter. Three of them are laptops. And I want to especially note that we are all ordinary people who are not at all obsessed with digital technologies, but rather try to use them, avoid these technologies as far as possible, and use computers only when we need it.

But let us nevertheless be closer to me, that is, to my work, and more precisely to my simple engineering solution, which allowed me to work on one computer with four fundamentally incompatible systems.
Until some time, on my main working computer, I used the old, good, reliable ... Windows XP. And I beg you, do not throw stones at me and spit bile. Until 2019, I personally had everything in it, absolutely everything suited me! But here came the eighth version of skype and after that all the rest of its versions just stopped working. Especially under XP. And while the advanced hacker brawl did not figure out how to get around this problem, I had to live my own mind.
It would seem that a lot of mind is not necessary - put the Seventh or Tenth Windows on a four-core computer with four gigabytes of memory, a two-gigabyte GF1050Ti card and a 120 GB gigabyte SSD - and the problem disappears, our hated beloved Skype will shine again in all its updated glory. But it turned out exactly the opposite, the problems rained down one after another, and what’s the most annoying - they all have no other solution than a complete replacement of all my peripheral equipment!
The HP1100 excellent printing laser printer, MUSTEC 1200 scanner, Creative Audigy sound card, Aver Media TV tuner, MIRO VIDEO DC10 video capture card, and even an unnamed WEB-camera - all these devices that served me for good were not the seventh, nor tenth system. Half of the devices did not work at all (falling out into the blue screen of death), and the other half could not find drivers, because for these systems they simply do not exist.
But I did not run to the store to get a new printer and scanner, I didn’t switch to the integrated sound card with a cheap AC97 codec, I didn’t throw out the TV tuner and video capture card. Only a WEB-camera bought another, for 200 rubles from aliexpress.
I went to garage and found there two sets of wires with power adapters for connecting SATA hard drives and a two-pole six-pole switch.



The idea is simple and reliable. We take another hard drive, any suitable for seven or tens. I took it from a laptop. We connect it to the motherboard, in the second SATA port. In the first SATA port, a native disk with the good old XP was already connected. The third SATA port of the motherboard includes DVD_RW. We solder the wires from the power supply to the switch, yellow (12 volts) and red (5 volts). The outputs are soldered to the adapters for powering the hard drives. And it turns out that now in one switch position two power supplies to the first hard drive, and in the other switch position to the second hard drive. Mass (black wire) is always connected to the drives.
When you turn on the computer, the motherboard in BIOS determines the working hard drive and boots from it. On the first disc, as I already said - good old XP with all my devices and programs,





On the second hard drive there is a seven with skype and Yandex browser, because nothing else, including this article, on it, with my "prehistoric" hardware, is already impossible to do.





On the sound card, I managed to find some clumsily modified driver from the x64 version, the rest of the "unidentified" hardware was simply disabled in the device manager.
That's how we live.

[/ center]

We press one button and load the corresponding operating system. If you need to change the "earth" axis, turn off the computer and press another button. After switching on, another, completely isolated (on another hard drive) operating system is loaded. The third hard drive in my computer, with 500 gigabytes, with all the documents, files and photos acquired by my overwork, is seen without any problems by all operating systems.

This simple and effective solution I have already applied on several of my computers, on different motherboards and with different hard drives. The flight is normal!

An attentive reader may ask a question, but what is it about your Linux header?
Answer: This is a DVD with a bootable image of UBUNTU 18.04. When I want to get distracted and, for example, climb all sorts of bad websites on the Internet, I put this disc on a DVD and the computer boots from it, regardless of the position of the switches of other “axes” and “systems”. This is because in the order of loading devices in the BIOS of the motherboard, first USB, then DVD, and then a hard disk are set. I emphasize that this UBUNTU sees everything perfectly and works with all my hardware, including a printer, a TV tuner and a video capture card. It is possible to work, but I'm just used to Windows.




Well, if you want a particularly refined expressionism, then for such a case I have a special bootable USB flash drive with the image of WIN PE 10. Insert it into any USB port and ... voila, it loads a little cropped, but fully functional dozen with a small set of the most necessary programs . The printer, scanner and tuner in this system are also not recognized and do not work.



Yes, and in conclusion, I want to once and for all answer the questions of especially "advanced" users about multisystem downloads, about all sorts of different EasyBCD, MultiBoot, GRUB, Boot manager, LILO, NTLDR, and so on ...
Swam, we know, tried - it makes you sick. Either I have some kind of allergy, or I don’t start dancing with a tambourine - but it doesn’t work out so quickly, simply and without hemorrhoids. With a switch, everything is much simpler and faster. And what gives the collective farm - I beg you, I'm a downshifter, I live and work on this collective farm!