HW Dual Booting A PC

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I am sure I used to be able to hardware dual boot my PC but I don’t seem able to any more.

By hardware dual boot I mean I have a removable drive caddy in which I have a 40Gb ATA drive set as master, fixed in my system I have a 160GB drive set as slave. In principle (and this used to work I thought) when I unlock my removable (essentially cutting its power), for the cost of a slight delay, the system will boot off the slave … that definitely works. When I relock the drive (restoring power) the system will power up and boot off the master … that works too but there’s a problem.

My problem seems to reside in the BIOS (which is why I wonder if some kind of standard Award BIOS

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I have a similar setup at home, but slightly different to yours. I have a hdd fixed into the case set as Master drive on IDE channel 0. As well as that I have a removable caddy in which I can just slot in various drives. These drives are also set as Master drives, but are on channel 1. In the BIOS, my boot order is HDD1, then HDD0. If there is no drive in the removable bay, the internal drive will boot. If a bootbale drive is inserted in the removable bay, then that one will boot. If, however, I place a non-bootable drive in the removable bay (eg for backups), then the system will boot from the internal drive as normal.

The important thing is to have the two drives on separate IDE channels.

HTH

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Hi Lyra,

OK (said uncertainly) … given that I also have an IDE DVD writer what channel would you put that on? I ask because I understand that putting a CD (OK a big CD) drive on the same channel as a hard disc can slow the latter down.

Thanks for replying

EDIT: I have tried that solution and (on this board at least, a Gigabyte 8KNXP rev 1.0) it doesn’t work (there doesn’t appear to be any way of setting and fixing HDD order apart from the boot order list which changes depending upon what it detects) … any other ideas?

Vamp

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Hey Vamp

I have my DVD-RW on channel 1, set as slave. As long as the removable caddy is empty, then there’s no performance hit. The only time you WILL get performance issues is if you have 2 devices on the same channel. The master device will always take priority over the slave. In my case, having the removable drive is more important than having full performance on the DVDRW all the time. Most time I use it, I make sure that the removable caddy is empty anyway, so it’s not really an issue.

As to why your setup won’t work, I really don’t know. If your BIOS boot order list changes depending on which devices are plugged in, then I can see that would certainly cause problems.

The only other thing I can think of is using your removable caddy is the only bootable device, and just swap boot HDDs as and when. If you wanted another HDD for backups etc, use an internal non-bootable drive.

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OK … Thanks Lyra

Personal Question: Robin Hood country? UK or Nottinghamshire? I only ask because I spent around 10 years in Notts (I still support Nottingham Forest even though they aren’t doing so well).

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Nottinghamshire. Just north of Nottingham itself actually. Whereabouts did you spend time in our green & pleasant county? (if you don’t mind me asking of course!)

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Hi Lyra,

I lived for about 10 years (maybe 11) right through the cool (and unfortunately late) Clough, Nottingham Forest years. I lived in a village called Ruddington … I think that was about 5 miles Southish of Nottingham. I went to school at Corpus Christi in Wilford (IIRC) and left Nottingham in 1979 to go to Polytechnic and have never really returned apart from a couple of brief visits.

I subscribe to the general idea that the Midlands and North are warmer (in terms of people) than here in the South … I now live in a town near Canterbury in Kent.

Sorry I haven’t replied, been a bit wrapped up in what feels like a whole bathroom reconstruction!

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