booting windows off a secondary or slave drive

[Anon]

i've seen a 1994 post that says DOS won't boot from a secondary drive.

Does Win9X boot off a Secondary drive? Off a slave(master or secondary)?
what about Win NT/2k/XP?

out of interest, does Win 3.1 only boot off a primary master?

 

[Wizard]

Windows boots from the 1st ACTIVE partition it sees.

 

[DaveW]

Win9x = No; must be primary drive.
Win XP = Will boot off secondary drive.

 

[Thomas Wendell]

Actually, all Windows' can be installed on any partition/disk, but the
loader files (NT,W2K,XP = ntldrntdetect,boot.ini), will be on the first
active primary partition.

Of course, if you can choose which physical disk (IDE0, IDE1 ...) you want
to have as 1st disk in BIOS boot order, that messes it up a bit....

There are ways to circumvent this with hidden partitions etc, but these
require 3rd party progs..



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[Anon]

Win9x = No; must be primary drive.
Win XP = Will boot off secondary drive.

will win9x boot off a primary slave's primary partition?
secondary partition?

does xp boot off any drive (primary drive or secondary drive , master
or slave, primary partition or secondary partition)?

thanks

 

[Eric]

DOS (Win3.1), Win9x,ME,NT,2000,XP all boot from primary master drive,
primary partition (which MS refers it as system partition).

However, you can install Win9x,ME,NT,2000,XP to another partition (which MS
refers it as boot partition), primary slave drive, or secondary master or
slave drive.

To create multiple boot system, you have to use your primary drive primary
paration as system paration and format as C: in FAT16 format (depended on
which OSes you install).

DOS, Win3.1, WIN95: Support FAT16 only
Win98, ME: Support FAT16 and FAT32
WinNT: Support FAT16, NTFS4
Win2000/XP: Support FAT16, FAT32, NTFS4, NTFS5

That means the following files must be in C: drive.

DOS/Win31:
-------------------
COMMAND.COM
MSDOS.SYS
IO.SYS
AUTOEXEC.BAT
CONFIG.SYS


WinNT/2000/XP:
-----------------------
BOOTSECT.DOS
BOOT.INI
NTLDR
NTDETECT.COM




Eric
http://pcsupport.xstudio.ca