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

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (978)	6/1/1998 9:21:00 PM
From: Dave Hanson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

Multiple booting, Zeuspaul's innovative thinking, Spot's good post. :) First, let me add my thanks for your boot post, Spots. I would have been hard pressed to try to spell that stuff out as well. You are truly a gracious guru. :) More generally, folks, this is really a fun and informative thread. A pleasure to take part in. Thanks to you Zeuspaul for all your hard work RE research and the wonderful auxiliary. Now that the (deserved) lovefest is done, on to the issues at hand that Zeuspaul raises: -I think, but am not certain, that cannot confirm, that your SCSI analysis is correct. A SCSI FAQ should confirm, if Spots or others can't. -Two FastTrak controllers can be used on one system, if you can spare the PCI slots. (These will become increasingly precious in the next 1-2 years, no doubt.) -I have had very good experiences with generic, off brand removable drive trays, around $20-25 each. Used them for a couple of years with no problems. The only caveat when using these non-cooled cheapies is to be sure to use cool-running drives that are not oversized, like the Maxtor Diamondmax 2880 series (see my "review" earlier today on this thread.) Here's a useful post on this subject from the comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage newsgroup: "I'm running two "mobile racks", paid $23 apiece at local generic PC store; extra drawers for $15 @. As for running the drives hot, I install the drives with the lids off and keep an empty bay betwwen the docking drawers. The cover plate to the empty bay is perferated and I've installed two extra case fans...there is a definate breeze between the drive drawers. Also for real convienence, the ide cable was converted to cable select, CSEL. The CSEL jumper setting on the drives now allows me to swap any drive with any docking bay without rejumpering the drives or messing with the bios settings. (To make a CSEL cable, cut the 28th wire from the red edge between the two drive connectors on a std. ide cable. The drive at the cable end will be slave, the middle, master.) Ten seconds and a reboot and you've got a different drive at either the slave or master position. QED Try it, you'll like it. Phillip Low" I have used the same method Phillip has, minus trying the CSEL (which I find very interesting, as you might.) Having a big case makes this all the more feasible, as the ventilation is better. I have not even needed to install extra case fans--the maxtor (and previously, a Seagate 2.5 gig medalist pro) never got more than moderately warm. -I am not as worried about isolating the operating systems as you may be, for reasons that I and Spots have mentioned. But your 3 disk proposal should work fine. If you put NT on the fat 16 drive, it should give you an easy way to do checks/fixes etc. on the NTFS drive. -NT lets you reletter drives fairly easily through Disk Administrator. The only caution is to not change the NT boot drive letter, and to make sure that the apps installed on NT are using the right drive letters. This mitigates problems with NT not seeing a Fat32 partition. -In my near-exhausted state I'm not sure I understand what the last paragraph is asking. Perhaps someone else could address this, or you might clarify a bit. BTW, have you checked out the FastTrak manual, on the promise site? It's excellent. The fact that it needs no drivers for DOS (reasonably enough) should mean that it would play very nicely with PowerQuest stuff. I'm considering buying one this week, esp since it should alleviate my Maxtor-flakey bios problems. Regards, Dave

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (978)	6/2/1998 9:19:00 AM
From: Spots	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

>>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? In Win 95 (and DOS), unrecognized partitions are simply omitted from the drive letter sequence and following partitions are assigned the letters sequentially In your example, the first drive would be C and the third D. I don't know about NT because NT recognizes everything I have; however, I would be very much surprised if it were different. Incidentally, the first primary partition on each physical disk gets a drive letter, THEN other primary partitions and logical drives in extended partitions, which is how my NT partition ended up with the letter G: It's the second partition on the first drive, and I initially booted with four drives, so the first partition on each drive got C, D, E, and F; and then the second partion on the first drive (the "C" drive) got G. I've never been much for extended partitions (in fact, I normally put only one partition per disk), so I'm now out of my depth as usual. But I think after the first partition letters are assigned for each disk, other partition letters get assigned in partition order within physical disk order. I suppose logical drives act like partitions in this sequence, but don't bet the farm on it. Oh, for the C drive at least, it's the first ACTIVE primary partition on the drive. (Partitions are marked active in the partition table of the master boot record.) I don't think active is a requirement for anything past the "C" partition.