Can two phyical drives both be marked as ACTIVE?

[Gerry Hickman]

Hi,

[stand alone box migration]

I'm trying to set up a new O/S on a second physical hard drive, but
still be able to boot into the old O/S on the existing hard drive. Both
hard drives are SCSI.

I'm planning something like

1. Have a working boot floppy to hand with NTLDR, NTDETECT, BOOT.INI
2. Create a slipstream SP4 build on the exitting drive
3. Connect the new drive on it's own SCSI ID
4. Boot back into O/S and create a FAT16 on the new drive
(assign letter Z: for now)
5. Run WinNT32 with /SYSPART pointing to the new drive
6. Reboot, but change the boot SCSI ID just before the O/S starts
(this should allow the new O/S to boot up)
7. Edit the boot.ini on the new O/S so I can still start the old O/S on
the old drive

What I'm not sure of is

1. Is this the best way to do it?
2. The new drive will become the "system" drive (NTLDR etc), but the old
drive will still have Intel boot code (marked ACTIVE), and in theory
could still be booted by changing it's SCSI ID.
3. What will happen to the drive letters as I boot each O/S? Will they
both see their respective "boot" drives as drive C: ?

(Triva Q: Why does MS call the boot drive the "system drive" and the
"system drive" the boot drive)

 

[Jim Collins [MSFT]]

You can have a dual boot system by just installing to the second drive. It
will use the same boot.ini, and you will have two options when you boot.
You can select either OS to boot into. The original drive will be the
system drive. You cannot have two phisical drives marked as active.

 

[Gerry Hickman]

Hi Jim,

The problem is I want the "new" drive to become the "system" drive
(NTLDR etc), so that I could eventually disconnect the older drive.

You cannot have two phisical drives marked as active.

Thanks, but do you know why this is the case? I fail to understand why
boot code on a second physical drive could cause a problem.

 

[Gerry Hickman]

Hi,

I've now tested this, and my plan worked fine. I connected the second
hard drive and ran /syspart. It was extremely fast and after rebooting
installed the integrated O/S to the new drive without any stupid
interaction with the old one.

I can now use SCSI IDs to choose the "boot" drive (system drive in MS
speak), or use boot.ini to choose O/S.

Each boot drive in MS speak (the one with the O/S) "sees" itself as
drive C, which is perfect.

It basically means you can easlily switch between the two different
Win2k builds, and also unplug the old drive and everything still works
independently because the boot code is on BOTH drives.