Dual Boot question involving two Windows
 

I'm heading off to college this next fall, so I managed to bag a copy of Windows XP Pro and Windows XP Pro 64.

I have two SATA hard drives right now, both 250 gigs.

Is there a way I'd be able to have an operating system on each of them and be able to choose which to boot off of?

It seems kind of over the top and lengthy, but I've heard good things about the 64 bit Windows, aside from the driver issue. So I wanted to be able to go between the two when I was having driver issues with Windows 64.

And I wanted to just use both of them to see which one I preferred in the long run, then I'd kill off the other hard drive and reformat it.

Is this possible?

yup i used to run 2000 and XP on one computer, I just installed them to seperate hard drives, windows took care of the rest, it automatically created a boot menu where you could choose the OS to run once you booted

Yes, it is definitely possible and I would recommend a dualboot option with XP-64. Although there are benefits to 64-bit Windows, the disadvantages far outweigh the positives (in my personal opinion). The main downside are the driver issues, and I think it was Canon who announced they had NO plans for 64-bit drivers.
Until another year passes and more programs are written for 64-bit, its more of a bells-and-whistles option.

i have two copies of xp on my laptop, one chinese and one engilsh.

No problems, they are even on the same physical drive, just different partitions. I think the chinese one is slowly starting to cause issues with the english one, slowing it down, etc. as its on C:.

But to set it up is no sweat and if you have space to burn (250Gigs each :O) then you will be fine.

Uh, is there a way to have three boot options?

I've got a third hard drive I'm taking from my old computer that I want to install Linux on just for kicks (curiosities sake, want to learn to use it, you know)

Is that possible?

I see no reason why not. I think the limit is on the partitions and the physical drives that are in the computer.

Fantastic.

So when it boots up it'll start with a question of "What would you like to boot" basically?

yup you can even change the setting in windows, on which is the default or how long the OS menu stays up before choosing the default.

it's under control panel - system - advanced tab - then startup and recovery

I once had Win Nt 4, Win 98, Redhat Linux, and Win 2000 quad-booting. It actually worked well for several months before I got bored with it. (Not bragging, it was just an experiment.) I had all four OS's running from one hard drive.I now dual-boot Win XP Pro and SuSE 9.1 Linux. Works quite well. But now I keep Linux on a separate drive.