Two master hard drives w/ two operating systems (one in a hard drive rack)
At school they have a hard drive in the computer that boots to xp but when you put a drive in the hard drive rack (vipower) it boots to 2000.. how did they do that? I'm trying to get the same effect at home with no luck. what am I doing wrong? I have a seagate baracuda 80 gig (in the computer) and a Maxtor 10 gig (in the rack). I also have a cd-rom on the second ide cable.. what should the jumpers be at and are there any settings I need to change in the bios.. I have a Dell demension 4100.. If I have to, I will break down and buy 2 rack inserts....
Thank you in advance!!!
Thank you in advance!!!
The rack should be at first IDE channel and jumpers should be set as Master. Your normal HD should be on a second IDE channel and its jumpers should be set as master. In bios, you should put that the first boot device is HARD DISK. That should be it.
You can use them as hot swap like Da-Bu has suggested. Or you can get a boot loader. I boot loader would be easier in the fact that you don't have to change the drives around you can have both of them in at the same time. The boot loader that I use is OLS2000, fairly cheap and is easy to use. here is a link
http://www.osloader.com/
http://www.osloader.com/
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But what happens when I want to install an OS that is installed from a bootable cd??
I tried putting only my main hard drive as master on the secondary ide cable without any other drives and it said that I has a nonsystem disk... Windows XP is installed on it... When I put it back as master on the Primary, It works! Is DA-BU trying to say that for the main HD to work (boot to XP) on the the secondary ide cable, I have to change the bios settings? Then when I put in the HD rack in, it will boot to whatever os I have installed on it because it is on the primary ide cable.. What should my boot order be and what ide cable should my cd-rom be on?
Sorry this is so long....
I tried putting only my main hard drive as master on the secondary ide cable without any other drives and it said that I has a nonsystem disk... Windows XP is installed on it... When I put it back as master on the Primary, It works! Is DA-BU trying to say that for the main HD to work (boot to XP) on the the secondary ide cable, I have to change the bios settings? Then when I put in the HD rack in, it will boot to whatever os I have installed on it because it is on the primary ide cable.. What should my boot order be and what ide cable should my cd-rom be on?
Sorry this is so long....
Yes, when you put HD rack in, it should boot from it no mather what OS you have installed.
In bios you can try with two options. You can put your hard drive as 1. boot device, and you should enable "search for bootable device"
You should put CDrom to second IDE channel where you keep your normal HD. In that way you will avoid confusion when you pull out HD rack.
In bios you can try with two options. You can put your hard drive as 1. boot device, and you should enable "search for bootable device"
You should put CDrom to second IDE channel where you keep your normal HD. In that way you will avoid confusion when you pull out HD rack.
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I'm glad that I could help, and thanks for the points :-)