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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Spots who wrote (970)	6/1/1998 4:25:00 PM
From: LTBH	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

Good post. Networm

To: Spots who wrote (970)	6/1/1998 5:59:00 PM
From: Zeuspaul	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14778

Dual booting (multiple booting). I second Networm, good post I've never seen a bios that allowed selection of more than the first IDE or the first SCSI drive, but apparently that's not so of newer bioses. The only mainboard BIOS option I have seen is just SCSI. I have checked the hard drive sites and have not found anything conclusive. They indicate that the default ID for SCSI hard discs is 0 and that 0 or 1 are IDs most commonly used. I surmise that the first found SCSI hard disc becomes the boot disc if the mainboard BIOS is set to look for SCSI first. If one has two SCSI hard discs ID 0 and ID 1 I assume and want to verify that one merely has to swap jumper/ID to change SCSI boot discs. It is possible although I was not able to determine from the Mylex RAID controller manual that their RAID controller can select a "first disc" regardless of ID setting. One of the options in the controller is JBOD ( just a bunch of discs ) ie no RAID. Discs are selected and given group letter names A B C etc. A may be a first found disc and therefore a boot disc. In a multi OS + backup system the four channels on an IDE controller may not be enough. If one had an IDE CD the available hard disc channels drops to three. At this point SCSI drives and SCSI or IDE RAID controllers may play a role. Dave, taking note, removable hard disc bays also look good. What kind do you have, any positive or negative experiences? A three disc machine may make sense. The first disc would be NT with NTFS. Is there a a need for a FAT 16 partition? I would rather dedicate the entire drive to NTFS as it may simplify the drive letter assignment to the third disc. The second disc would be Win95 with FAT 32. The third disc would be FAT 16. It would be a go between disc as FAT 16 is the only format that both NT and Win95 can read. Using BIOS redirect ( yet to be proven) If one were to boot the first disc (NT) it would become C:, the second disc (FAT32) would not be recognized so the third disc (FAT 16) would become D:. (use BIOS disable option if necessary to hide FAT32 disc) If one were to boot Win95 the first disc (NTFS) would not be recognized, Win95 would become C: and the third disc (FAT 16) would again be D:. To keep things simple NT 5 and Win98 could be "sitting on the shelf" . One could remove the NT 4.0 hard disc a la Dave Hanson and plug in NT 5.0. Same for a Win95/Win98 swap. That is, you have to boot with the sequence DOS would assign, or in NT's case, you boot from a drive number/controller number. The BIOS and controllers (and controller bios) can clearly affect this assignment but registry entries cannot--the OS has to boot up first, If drive number/controller number effect drive letter assignment would the second drive (FAT 32 WIn 95) be assigned a letter even though it does not have a recognized format? Would the third drive then become E: even if the second drive did no receive a letter as it is not recognized? Zeuspaul