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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC )
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To: Clarence Dodge who wrote (2665)9/27/1998 1:45:00 PM
From: Zeuspaul  Read Replies (2) of 14778
 
Configuring a KOT drive

The pros and cons of KOT drives have been discussed. Proceed at your own risk.

Requirements for two drive KOT IDE system

        Two hard drives

        Mobo bios that supports boot sequence selection

        Partition Magic ( or equal )


Second Harddrive

My current thinking is the second drive (KOT..Keep on Truck'n)) should be bigger than the primary drive. To maintain a working backup at all times one needs at least two clones of the primary drive. I have three copies on the KOT drive. For the time being I have limited the primary drive to 2GB. This gives me room for three backups on a 6 GB KOT drive. The backups are at different stages of the development of my software installation. If I were to use the first backup I would have to restore the essential data files from removable media...or restore it from another location on the KOT drive

Motherboard bios must support drive boot selection

This option is available on most new motherboards. One can find the info in the mobo manual or by accessing the bios. The methodology for accessing bios varies. On my computer I push *DEL* shortly after the initiation of the boot sequence. This is operating system independent as it occurs before the OS starts loading.

One will see a list of bootable devices once the bios page has loaded. It will vary depending on the bios. One can select the order of the devices. Most default sequences start with the A drive..then CDROM..then the primary harddrive. One only need alter the the primary harddrive selection. The bios in my machine has an option for each of 4 possible harddrive selections. The primary and secondary drives on each of two channels on the IDE controller.

Partition Magic

Partition Magic handles all of the harddrive cloning and copying operations. There is a multiboot option in Partition Magic but I do not use it. Most multiboot programs use the primary harddrive in the first step. If your primary drive should fail you will not be able to access the other OS installations. If the primary drive fails you lose.

I opt instead for totally independent harddrives wrt the OSes.

Configuring

The entire process is really quite simple.

First install Partition Magic. A Win95/98 installation is the easiest. One does not have to deal with floppies with a Win 95/98 installation. If I never see another floppy it's ok with me! The program is DOS based and runs in DOS mode...not MS DOS prompt in the program menu. When the program is executed it shuts down win 95/98. One can run the program from floppies and the A drive ( as would be required in NT and there is no Win 95/98 installation). The Win 95/98/DOS execution is easier to use than the DOS/floppy execution. The Win 95/98 execution is graphic and more user friendly

Installing the second harddrives requires setting a jumper on the harddrive. There is one master and one slave on an IDE channel. The primary drive is the master so the secondary drive will be jumpered to slave if it is installed on the same channel. It could be a master if it were installed on the second IDE channel.

If one is using recent bios the computer will see the drive and auto configure all of the things I do not understand..heads etc.

Partition Magic has been installed in Win 95/98 on the primary drive and the second drive is installed and recognized by the computer

Execute Partition Magic from Win 95/98. You will be informed that you are leaving the Win 95/98 environment. You will see a list of available drives. Be very careful. Copy the primary partition on the primary drive to the free space on the newly installed drive. Partition magic will clone the format and data from the old drive to the new drive. The new partition on the new drive will be identical in all ways including total size of the original partition and the label. After the cloning process be sure and change the label. If you do not you will get confused about which drive is which. I use the date of the clone as the label for the partition.

If you do not have a current backup do not resize or alter the original installation on the original drive in any way. There is a risk of data loss. Once you have a working backup resize the primary partition on the primary drive if you want.

Next set the partition on the KOT drive to active. There will be two active partitions. One on the primary drive and one on the KOT drive.

Exit Partition Magic and go through the standard boot process. Verify that the machine works as it did before. You will see the second drive in Explorer. It will most likely appear as the D drive. Check the drive labels in Explorer to become familiar with the two drives.

Next boot the machine and hit "del" (or other) to enter the bios. Change the sequence of the IDE drives. Save and exit. The machine will boot again. This time the machine will boot to the KOT drive. Go to Explorer. The KOT drive is now the C drive and the primary drive is now the D drive.

Next boot again, enter the bios and reselect the primary drive as the first boot drive.

You now have two totally independent working harddrives.

Installing new software, drivers or playing with configurations

Before placing your computer at risk make another more recent backup. Execute Partition Magic and clone the current primary partition to the KOT drive. Do not delete the first backup. Instead clone the current partition to the free space on the KOT drive. There will now be two clones on the KOT drive. In Partition Magic *hide* the first backup and set the latest clone *active*. When you select the second drive in the bios the active partition will be the boot partition.

If you want/need to go back to the earlier backup go to Partition magic, and set to *active* the partition you want to boot from and *hide* the other.

The concept can be expanded to include more drives, SCSI drives, a combination of SCSI drives and IDE drives, and multiple operating systems..DOS..Win 95..Win 98..NT....and I assume Linux and BEOS.

My current setup includes four harddrives and four OS installations. One primary IDE Win 95 installation with an IDE KOT drive and one SCSI Win 98 installation with a SCSI KOT drive.

Zeuspaul

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