Boot From Multi Hard Drives--HELP

Can somebody please give me some direction as to how I can boot my computer
from multiple Hard Drives. I do it now except when I want to boot from a
different drive I just move the cables around. As you might imagine not a
very good solution. I've been told to create a floppy with the boot loader
info on it, but is there anyway it can be BIOS based? I'm not a programmer
as such although I can cut and paste with the best of them. Any help is
greatly appreciated.
Pat

on Wed January 14 2004 9:31 am, Pat decided to enlighten us with:

Can somebody please give me some direction as to how I can boot my
computer from multiple Hard Drives. I do it now except when I want to boot
from a different drive I just move the cables around. As you might imagine
not a
very good solution. I've been told to create a floppy with the boot
loader info on it, but is there anyway it can be BIOS based? I'm not a
programmer as such although I can cut and paste with the best of them. Any
help is greatly appreciated.
Pat

Partition Commander or a similar product should do the trick.

--
Big Daddy Ruel Smith

My SuSE Linux machine uptime:
8:11pm up 38 days 4:56, 2 users, load average: 0.05, 0.11, 0.13

My Windows XP machine uptime:
Something less...

Pat wrote:
| Can somebody please give me some direction as to how I can boot my
| computer from multiple Hard Drives. I do it now except when I want to
| boot from a different drive I just move the cables around. As you
| might imagine not a very good solution. I've been told to create a
| floppy with the boot loader info on it, but is there anyway it can be
| BIOS based? I'm not a programmer as such although I can cut and paste
| with the best of them. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Yes, you can do it in the BIOS - its probably the simplest way. Nothing
extra (like a special boot loader) to install and go wrong.
As the machine boots, just after the POST, hit DEL and you'll go into the
BIOS config.
Most likely the second optin will be called 'BIOS features' or something
similar - hit ENTER to get into this.
You should see options for the 'boot order' - the order in which storage
devices are scanned on boot. If you have a floppy and two hard drives, it
might go something like: First = floppy, Second = IDE-0, Third = IDE-1.
To get your machine to boot off the slave (IDE-1) drive instead of the
master (IDE-0) drive, you just alter them there. So now you have: First =
floppy, Second = IDE-1, Third = IDE-0.
Follow the on-screen instructions to leave that BIOS setup saving your
changes ('Save and Exit').
Your computer will now try to boot into the Slave HDD - but if it doesn't
work (maybe no OS installed yet ?) it will default to the Master HDD.
The above must be about the simplest and safest way of multi-booting I
know of. I've used it for years. The problem arises when you want to be able
to select from more than 5 op systems. After IDE0, IDE1, IDE2, IDE3 and SCSI
where do you go next ?
Kevin.

On Wed, 14 Jan 2004 14:31:06 GMT, Pat wrote:

Can somebody please give me some direction as to how I can boot my computer
from multiple Hard Drives. I do it now except when I want to boot from a
different drive I just move the cables around. As you might imagine not a
very good solution. I've been told to create a floppy with the boot loader
info on it, but is there anyway it can be BIOS based? I'm not a programmer
as such although I can cut and paste with the best of them. Any help is
greatly appreciated.
Pat

If you post what Operating Systems you are using, somebody can
probably offer you a better sollution. I presently have one box with
Win98, Mandrake Linux, and SuSE Linux (my favorite now) installed in
that order. Linux will install a boot loader, either lilo or grub,
that will give you the option of what OS you wish to boot to. In my
case SuSE gave me the option to merge other boot loaders it found
allowing me to triple boot my test system. My test system only has one
hard drive with multiple partitions, but my main system has 2 OS's on
2 different hard drives on a 3 hard drive setup.
You may be able to setup a bootloader with out having to reinstall
your OS's as well.
Stephen Spark