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Old January 28th 06, 03:11 AM posted to comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
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Default Boot.ini question

rdisk(N) refers to Int13 drive 80h+N, simple as that.
How Int13 drives are ordered is completely up to the BIOS.
"fdisk /status" from DOS tells you, Disk Manager does NOT.

"Timothy Daniels" wrote in message
...

I stand by my claim, Rod. You can check if you want,
and you can make all the denials you want, but it is true,
and anyone can check that out - the "rdisk()" parameter
is relative to the top of the hard drive boot order, and it
only relates to physical position, i.e. cable position or
IDE channel number, in the default case. In the DEFAULT
case, the hard drive boot order is:

Master, IDE channel 0,
Slave, IDE channel 0,
Master, IDE channel 1,
Slave, IDE channel 1.

But when this order is changed in the BIOS, the
meaning of "rdisk()" changes physically, but it retains
its logical meaning as a reference to the boot order.
That means that "rdisk(0)" will ALWAYS refer to the
head of the boot order, regardless of which physical
hard drive is put at the head of the boot order, and
"rdisk(1)" will ALWAYS refer to the next one in the list.

Accordingly, I code boot.ini files to implement
switching between up to 7 or 8 clone OSes which are
resident simultaneously on 3 hard drives in my computer,
and the "rdisk()" parameter has always meant what I've
described above. I base this on the behavior of my
Dell Dimension XPS system which is about as common
as a PC can get.

*TimDaniels*