Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of Barthax
BarthaxFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

asked on

Discovering boot.ini's rdisk setting from within Windows

Hi all,

I have a simple thing I would like to discover instead of good old "trial and error" method of discovering the boot.ini's required rdisk() for a hard drive.  Scenario: a customer has purchased and installed a new hard drive, installed Windows Vista onto the second hard drive (Windows XP on the first).  The customer then discovers that if left alone, the first hard drive is used to boot up (they haven't changed the BIOS boot order) and it doesn't know about the second hard drive's install.

The customer has got into the habit of waiting for the POST and hitting the relevant key to select the boot device, then selecting the second hard drive.  I have no physical access to the machine but have determined both drives are IDE.  My one and ONLY question I have from this set up is:

As the rdisk() property is physically related, once booted into Windows Vista or Windows XP, how would I determine which rdisk number is the second drive (so that I can alter the boot.ini of the first hard drive).  Presumably, this discover process would translate to Windows 7, 2003, 2008, etc?

Please do not post about altering the BIOS - I know that stuff but I am not going to talk something through it over the phone.  Please do not post about figuring our the multi(), disk() or partition() settings - I know how to figure those out & the drives are IDE so there's no need to discuss scsi() options.
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of flubbster
flubbster
Flag of United States of America image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Avatar of Barthax

ASKER

Thanks. :D