Inline......
--
Walter Clayton - MS MVP(WinXP)
Associate Expert
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
http://www.dts-l.org
Ron Patterson said:
Pent IV - Win XP Pro -
I just installed a 40Gb additional HD as slave on the primary cable and used
the Maxtor CD copy program to copy the
original Master HD to the new slave HD.
I want a way to occasionally boot from the new slave HD without opening the
box. Can I do this thru the BIOS?
Most BIOSes have support for this, yes. Note however that NT kernals make
this tricky at best. Unless you can also successfully disable the primary
drive in the BIOS, the system will continue to enumerate the primary HD as
C: and will in fact load the system from the primary drive.
What about just swapping the drive letters from F: to C: ?
You can not alter the drive letter of the boot/system drive.
Is there any way I can boot from the slave without swapping the ribbon
connectors?
Maybe. That depends on whether you're running cable select or master/slave
and the requirements of your IDE controller. More in a bit....
If I swap the ribbons, do I also have to change the jumpers?
As above, maybe.
Recommend a site to educate me on dual boot info?
Succintly, none I'm aware of. The general issues are rather simple, but the
problem is that although the mechanics are the same different methodologies
and/or applications have different requirements. To further complicate
things, NT kernals will retain drive enumeration regardless of how things
may be recabled. This is what makes BIOS multi-booting of an NT kernal
tricky at best. I could talk you through the registry hack to make it work
in your instance, but the results are rather fragile at best. You could also
use the NT kernel multi-boot manager, but that's another rather fagile tool;
you can hose it just by sneezing.
3rd party mult-boot tools are the best bet. I use to recommend
PartitionMagic for beginners, but now that Symantec has bought it, I can't
make that recommendation any more. I currently use BootIT NG from
http://www.bootitng.com. There are other tools, but without knowing what you
want to do, going into specifics is a bit much at present. ;-)
An alternative is to install a hot swap cage. That way you just power off,
eject an HD, replace it power up and run.
My Intel motherboard literature has some mention of a Legacy system?
Legacy in what context? Legacy USB refers to the ability of the BIOS to give
low level, DOS like support, for USB keyboards and mice. A legacy free
machine has no floppy, com ports, PS2 ports, LPT ports or anything else
dependant on the superIO chip.
Any way to boot from an external USB HD?
Depends on the BIOS. I have a laptop that is about a year old that has USB 2
ports but does not support USB device boot. My desktop is running an NForce
2 Ultra chipset and it can boot from USB devices, including those thumb
drives.
