I have done many NT installations both to IDE, SCSI and mixed systems. What has been said about booting NT is essentially correct with a few exceptions. If NT is on an x86 based system and booting from the first or second SCSI drive on the first SCSI controller, then NT will boot without the NTBOOTDD.SYS file. To do this you need to use the "multi" syntax in the boot.ini file instead of the "SCSI" syntax.
It is the boot.ini file that points NT where to go to find it's system directory and files, and depending if the system is a pure IDE, pure SCSI or mixed drive system, various rules apply.
In a mixed IDE/SCSI system one must use the "SCSI" syntax in the boot.ini and the respective NTBOOTDD.SYS file to boot from a scsi drive, even if it is the first one. The NTBOOTDD.SYS file is nothing more than the correct sys driver file for your specific SCSI card, renamed or copied to NTBOOTDD.SYS. For example if you are using an adaptec 15xx series SCSI card then you would copy the aha154x.sys file from the winnt/system32/drivers/ directory to NTBOOTDD.sys or just copy and rename it. On a default NT installation to a SCSI drive, the boot.ini is always created using the "multi" function, without a NTBOOTDD.SYS. The presence of the NTBOOTDD.SYS file when booting to an IDE drive will not cause any problems. The boot.ini can have as many lines as needed, each pointing to a particular SCSI adapter, drive, and partition. NT is very versatile, a single system can have many different NT installs and all bootable from particular entry in the boot.ini file.
It should be absolutely no problem to have mixed IDE / SCSI drives in an NT system and have them all bootable. Seems kind of complicated but after you have done a few, its very logical.
There are a couple of articles on the knowledge base that explain it, I'm sure better than I did. Very informative articles.
support.microsoft.com
support.microsoft.com
support.microsoft.com
support.microsoft.com
support.microsoft.com
Sorry for the lengthy post, I probably didn't do a very good job explaining it. After all, I spend my days in front of computer screens, not writing manuals. :)
Good Luck
Dan |
