Boot.ini question

Timothy Daniels wrote:

"Rod Speed" wrote:
Its much better to test it in the simple config of a motherboard with
just two IDE ports and no RAID controller etc to simplify things.

Read the thread "meaning of 'rdisk()' in boot.ini file". I re-ran the
entire experiment with the 3 HDs connected to the motherboard IDE
controller, and exactly the results were found - rdisk(n) refers to the
hard drive having a displacement "n" from the head of the hard drive
boot order.

http://support.microsoft.com/default...en-us;q102873:

"Theoretically, this syntax could be used to start Windows NT on any drive
in the system. However, this would require that all drives are correctly
identified through the standard INT 13 interface; since support for this
varies from disk controller to disk controller and most system BIOS only
identify a single disk controller through INT 13, in practice it is only
safe to use this syntax to start Windows NT from the first two drives
connected to the primary disk controller, or the first four drives in the
case of a dual-channel EIDE controller."


Thinking about it (again , it probably can't be the boot order. Aren't
there BIOS/controllers that don't boot from all disks connected to them,
yet these disks may still have rdisk numbers and allow starting Windows on
them?

Gerhard

"Gerhard Fiedler" asked:
Timothy Daniels wrote:

"Rod Speed" wrote:
Its much better to test it in the simple config of a motherboard with
just two IDE ports and no RAID controller etc to simplify things.

Read the thread "meaning of 'rdisk()' in boot.ini file". I re-ran the
entire experiment with the 3 HDs connected to the motherboard IDE
controller, and exactly the results were found - rdisk(n) refers to the
hard drive having a displacement "n" from the head of the hard drive
boot order.

http://support.microsoft.com/default...en-us;q102873:

"Theoretically, this syntax could be used to start Windows NT on any drive
in the system. However, this would require that all drives are correctly
identified through the standard INT 13 interface; since support for this
varies from disk controller to disk controller and most system BIOS only
identify a single disk controller through INT 13, in practice it is only
safe to use this syntax to start Windows NT from the first two drives
connected to the primary disk controller, or the first four drives in the
case of a dual-channel EIDE controller."


Thinking about it (again , it probably can't be the boot order. Aren't
there BIOS/controllers that don't boot from all disks connected to them,
yet these disks may still have rdisk numbers and allow starting Windows on
them?


What's your point? (All I see is a non-sequitur question.)

As for the meaning of "rdisk()", you're falling into Rod Speed's
habit of relying on specifications and ignoring the Ding am Sich.
What is more significant - the way things REALLY are or the way
some obsure spec says they SHOULD be?

*TimDaniels*

Peter wrote

Isn't it time for a wet paper bag? LOL

Funny you should say that, I just applied one |-)

Timothy Daniels lied
Rod Speed wrote
Timothy Daniels lied

Forget it. Rod's motive is to obuscate.

Lying, as always.

That's why the above paragraph is gibberish

You did manage to work out what I was proposing, liar.

- it's meant to confuse, not clarify. This is evident from his
insistance that one boot.ini file be used for the entire experiment.

What a terminal ****wit you have always been, child.

If one were to change the boot order such that a different
hard drive moved to the head of the hard drive boot order,

I CLEARLY SAID THAT THE DRIVE AT THE TOP OF THE
BOOT ORDER SHOULD NOT BE CHANGED AND THAT
ONLY THE DRIVES BELOW THAT SHOULD BE SWAPPED.

And that is exactly what I did.

Lying, as always. You not only had a boot.ini on EVERY drive,
you ALSO changed the drive at the top of the boot list.

Breathe deeply, count to 10, and read the description of the experiment
again.

Dont need to, it stays **** no matter how often its read.
And its better to hold your breath when reading **** too.

You'll see that for each of the 3 HDs, I used the same boot.ini file to
boot each of the 3 HDs.

Pity I said to have JUST ONE BOOT.INI FILE ON THE DRIVE
THAT STAYS AT THE TOP OF THE LIST AND ISNT EVER
SELECTED IN THE MENU THE BOOT.INI PRESENTS.

Then I rearranged the HDs below the head of the hard drive boot order and
re-did the procedure. Then,
in changing the head of the hard drive boot order to do the whole
process over again, your proposed scenario was implemented.
IOW, your proposed experiment was a subset of what I did,

Yes, but I clearly didnt specify that subset to
CONFUSE anyone, you silly little pathological liar.

but you don't recognize that what I did was just your own proposed
configuration and procedure done on a larger scale.

Irrelevant to your lie that my test was to CONFUSE.

IOW, your own proposed experiment proved you to be wrong.

No it didnt with your pig ignorant claim that the rdisk() param
ALWAYS refers to the boot order sequence number.

It certainly does apply to that very badly designed steaming turd
you are using if you arent actually lying about what gets booted,
but you havent proven a damned thing about any other system.

And since you are clearly a pathological liar, I wouldnt believe
what you claim you are seeing on that system of yours either.
I'd want to see someone else agree that they get that ****ed
result on another Dell or Phoenix biosed system first.

Timothy Daniels wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Antoine Leca wrote
Rod Speed wrote

And its completely trivial to prove that it doesnt with the test I
posted.

You meant:
] The obvious problem with your claim is trivial to prove.
] Setup a test config where the boot.ini comes off the
] first drive in the boot list in the bios, with an entry to
] boot off a different physical drive. When you move
] that later physical drive in the boot order in the bios,
] that doesnt make any difference to which drive gets
] booted when you select that entry in the boot.ini at
] boot time. The N value changes according to you
] because you have moved it in the bios boot sequence
] list. XP still boots the same physical drive regardless.

The problem with this test is that it does not work in general.

Irrelevant when testing for what the rdisk() parameter actually refers
to.

Its much better to test it in the simple config of a motherboard
with just two IDE ports and no RAID controller etc to simplify things.

Read the thread "meaning of 'rdisk()' in boot.ini file".

No point, it has no relevance what so ever to what I was commenting on
there.

I re-ran the entire experiment with the 3 HDs connected to the
motherboard IDE controller, and exactly the results were found - rdisk(n)
refers to the hard drive having a displacement "n" from the head of the
hard drive boot order.

Irrelevant to what I was commenting on there.

Gerhard Fiedler wrote
Timothy Daniels wrote
Rod Speed wrote

Its much better to test it in the simple config of a motherboard
with just two IDE ports and no RAID controller etc to simplify things.

Read the thread "meaning of 'rdisk()' in boot.ini file". I re-ran
the entire experiment with the 3 HDs connected to the motherboard IDE
controller, and exactly the results were found - rdisk(n) refers to
the hard drive having a displacement "n" from the head of the hard
drive boot order.

http://support.microsoft.com/default...en-us;q102873:

"Theoretically, this syntax could be used to start Windows NT on any
drive in the system. However, this would require that all drives are
correctly identified through the standard INT 13 interface; since
support for this varies from disk controller to disk controller and
most system BIOS only identify a single disk controller through INT
13, in practice it is only safe to use this syntax to start Windows
NT from the first two drives connected to the primary disk
controller, or the first four drives in the case of a dual-channel
EIDE controller."

Thinking about it (again , it probably can't be the boot order.

The main reason its unlikely to have been intended to be the
boot order number is that the boot.ini would have to be edited
when the boot order is changed. Even MS aint usually THAT stupid.

AND they dont even mention the boot order, and it wasnt changeable
in the systems around at the time that NT first used a boot.ini anyway.

Aren't there BIOS/controllers that don't boot from all disks connected to
them,

Yes, in fact initially quite a few wouldnt even boot the
slave drive with a single IDE controller, two drives in total.

yet these disks may still have rdisk numbers

Would always have rdisk numbers.

and allow starting Windows on them?

Yep, that was one of the reasons for boot.ini in the first place,
to allow NT to be booted from other than the primary master drive.

"Rod Speed" wrote in message
Gerhard Fiedler wrote
Timothy Daniels wrote
Rod Speed wrote

Its much better to test it in the simple config of a motherboard
with just two IDE ports and no RAID controller etc to simplify things.

Read the thread "meaning of 'rdisk()' in boot.ini file". I re-ran
the entire experiment with the 3 HDs connected to the motherboard IDE
controller, and exactly the results were found - rdisk(n) refers to
the hard drive having a displacement "n" from the head of the hard
drive boot order.

http://support.microsoft.com/default...en-us;q102873:

"Theoretically, this syntax could be used to start Windows NT on any
drive in the system. However, this would require that all drives are
correctly identified through the standard INT 13 interface; since
support for this varies from disk controller to disk controller and
most system BIOS only identify a single disk controller through INT
13, in practice it is only safe to use this syntax to start Windows
NT from the first two drives connected to the primary disk
controller, or the first four drives in the case of a dual-channel
EIDE controller."

Thinking about it (again , it probably can't be the boot order.

The main reason its unlikely to have been intended to be the
boot order number is that the boot.ini would have to be edited
when the boot order is changed. Even MS aint usually THAT stupid.

AND they dont even mention the boot order, and it wasnt changeable
in the systems around at the time that NT first used a boot.ini anyway.

Aren't there BIOS/controllers that don't boot from all disks connected
to them,

Yes, in fact initially quite a few wouldnt even boot the
slave drive with a single IDE controller, two drives in total.

yet these disks may still have rdisk numbers

Would always have rdisk numbers.

Utter Nonsense. Bios support can be disabled.


and allow starting Windows on them?

Yep, that was one of the reasons for boot.ini in the first place,
to allow NT to be booted from other than the primary master drive.

Timothy Daniels wrote:
"Gerhard Fiedler" asked:
Timothy Daniels wrote:

"Rod Speed" wrote:
Its much better to test it in the simple config of a motherboard
with just two IDE ports and no RAID controller etc to simplify
things.

Read the thread "meaning of 'rdisk()' in boot.ini file". I re-ran
the entire experiment with the 3 HDs connected to the motherboard
IDE controller, and exactly the results were found - rdisk(n)
refers to the hard drive having a displacement "n" from the head of
the hard drive boot order.

http://support.microsoft.com/default...en-us;q102873:

"Theoretically, this syntax could be used to start Windows NT on any
drive in the system. However, this would require that all drives are
correctly identified through the standard INT 13 interface; since
support for this varies from disk controller to disk controller and
most system BIOS only identify a single disk controller through INT
13, in practice it is only safe to use this syntax to start Windows
NT from the first two drives connected to the primary disk
controller, or the first four drives in the case of a dual-channel
EIDE controller." Thinking about it (again , it probably can't be the
boot order.
Aren't there BIOS/controllers that don't boot from all disks
connected to them, yet these disks may still have rdisk numbers and
allow starting Windows on them?


What's your point? (All I see is a non-sequitur question.)

As for the meaning of "rdisk()", you're falling into Rod Speed's
habit of relying on specifications and ignoring the Ding am Sich.
What is more significant - the way things REALLY are

You aint established that that is the way they REALLY
are except on that steaming turd of yours.

And its very bloody unlikely indeed that the rdisk() param
is the boot order sequence number when the MS documentation
and everyone else's documentation of the ARCpath spec
doesnt even mention the boot order sequence at all.

or the way some obsure spec says they SHOULD be?

Never ever could bull**** its way out of a wet paper bag.

If the rdisk() param really did refer to the boot order
sequence number on many systems at all, you'd see
comments about that using google.

You dont, so your pig ignorant claim that
its universal is clearly just plain wrong.

Timothy Daniels wrote:

Thinking about it (again , it probably can't be the boot order. Aren't
there BIOS/controllers that don't boot from all disks connected to
them, yet these disks may still have rdisk numbers and allow starting
Windows on them?

What's your point?

Simple logic.

(All I see is a non-sequitur question.)

Can you point out exactly what is "non-sequitur" here?

As for the meaning of "rdisk()", you're falling into Rod Speed's habit of
relying on specifications and ignoring the Ding am Sich.

If you can't cite correctly, look it up or leave it... "Ding am Sich"
is just sick.

What is more significant - the way things REALLY are or the way some
obsure spec says they SHOULD be?

You seem to have a pretty clear vision of how things /should/ be on other
machines, derived from how they may be on yours -- and not care much about
how they /really/ are...

Citing your first post regarding this matter in this thread: "You can also
think of "rdisk()" as meaning the "relative disk position", that is,
relative to the head of the BIOS's hard drive boot order."

If I did as you say, how would I get the rdisk number for drives the BIOS
can't boot from? I suppose they don't appear in the BIOS's hard drive boot
order.

Gerhard

"Gerhard Fiedler" enscribed:
Aren't there BIOS/controllers that don't boot from all disks connected to
them, yet these disks may still have rdisk numbers and allow starting
Windows on them?


This ends with a question mark, but it sure ain't a sentence. What is it?

*TimDaniels*