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To: Zeuspaul who wrote (911)	6/3/1998 10:18:00 PM
From: Zeuspaul	Read Replies (1) of 14778

Promise Fasttrack IDE RAID....more from DRWHOM from Tom's forum tomshardware.com My question Within the Promise BIOS do you have options to select different hard discs as the boot disc? For example could you have one operating system on a particular disc and select it as a boot disc. Could you then on a subsequent boot go into the Promise BIOS and select another disc with a different operating system and boot from that second disc? _____________________________________________________________________ From:the dr (DRWHOM) To:Zeuspaul (ZEUSPAUL) Posted: 6/3/98 8:00:00 PM The answer is yes, exactly! In the fasttrak bios setup you can assign which drive is the boot drive amongst the drives attached to the card. For this to work the drive in question must have been partitioned as a primary dos partition when it was partitioned. For example I will explain how I have my four quantum 6.4's setup now. In the bios I have each drive configured as a single stripe of only one disk. The effect of this configuration is to have each drive treated as an array of only one drive. When my system boots the bios shows that there are 4 functioning raid arrays listed as array1, array2, array3 and array4. If I go into the bios setup, one of the menu options will show these arrays and indicate which disk belongs to each and also which controller channel it is attached to. One of the other menu options allows me to change the array configuration settings. It is here that I can change which array(ie. disc) is the boot array. One of the other menu options allows me to take an existing drive with data on it and mirror(copy) it exactly onto one of the other attached drives. Whenever I want to try something wild in the software or hardware settings I will mirror the C drive and then go into the bios setup and make that new mirrored copy drive the boot drive. As soon as I reboot the computer, it is running off that other drive although the system now calls "it" the C drive. If I royally screw everything up on that drive then I simply reboot, go into the fasttrak bios setup and reassign the original drive back as the C drive again and I'm right back to normal. The nice thing about this procedure is that the card does these mirrors so quickly. It can completely copy(mirror) a C drive of 3 gigs to a second drive in about 15 minutes and the copy is perfect in all respects. So yes, although I have never done it myself I am sure you could partition, format and install say windows95 on one drive and NT on another drive and some other kind of OS on a third drive and simply switch which drive is the boot drive from one to the other by going into the bios setup without ever opening the case and touching the hardware! I hope this answers your question. As you may have guessed I have had a lot of fun doing this kind of juggling with the card. the dr

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