My desktop has two hard drives one with XP other with Vista. After booting up and selecting the hard drive needed the other hard drive will it still spin.. How do I limit HDs ware-tare. Toggle switch?

Answer 1

The hard drive will always start up when it's plugged in and the computer is turned on. The only way to stop this is to unplug the drive from the computer. But Just turning on and spinning up, will not cause significant ware on the read heads or platters. It would actually keep the drive from getting "rusty". Not that it actually rusts, however.

"Real" ware is usually caused by the read/write heads moving around and reading/writing stuff to/from the disk. Windows will occasionally read or write small bits of data from the secondary drive, during it's normal routines, but not any significant amount.

But if you REALLY want it to stop running, then you would need to turn the computer off, unplug the power cord from it, unscrew the side panel off the computer case, and pop it open, then unplug the drive you're not using. Then you'd need to set the jumper on the drive that's plugged in to "Master without Slave", or "Cable Select". The jumper is a little block that sets onto two pins on the drive to short a circut between them and tell the drive what it's position is, basically. it will usually look like a small white block stuck into some pins. The drive should have a label telling you what pins to place the jumper on. Cable Select is the easiest setting, because it will automatically detect what it should be based on it's position on the data cable. You would put both drives on CS and they'll work. But sometimes the computer won't like that and that's when you set it manually, Master and Slave, or Primary and Secondary.

If you disconnect the drive on the end of the cable (primary/master) then you'll need to move the other one up from the second connector to the first, on the end of the cable.

Then close the case, and plug the computer in. It should only have one option in the drive selection, or not even ask, and just boot to the one plugged in. If it doesn't boot, then you set the jumpers wrong or have the drive on the wrong part of the data cable. The Data cable is a wide, flat ribbon cable with (usually) two rectangular connectors on it. The Power cable is a four pin connector with red, black, and yellow wires.

The above describes the old ATA connectors for ATA drives. It could also be the new SATA (Serial ATA) drives and connectors, which are a lot easier to connect and transfar data faster. They look like small little cords with no obvious pins or holes. SATA doesn't require setting jumpers, and it should not even have one.

And when messing with the drives, always make sure the computer is OFF and unplugged. And if you can't get it to work with the new configuration, put everything back the way it was. If you really worried, you could even take pictures, to make sure you get it all back to how it was before.

But like said above, just leaving the drives alone won't cause any significant harm to them. and you would have to do this procedure every time you wanted to switch from XP to Vista or vice versa.