PC hardware forum: BIOS Upgrade to Boot Second Hard Drive?

Ohh, I should have said, that Spinrite works on FAT type HDs not NTSF. So, here is a link that may help further your quest:

http://www.buildorbuy.org/datarecovery.html

Also, I like to recommend checking with the Ontrack people they offer some solutions, too.

good luck -----Willy

Posted by: willy Posted on: 03/29/2004 5:37 AM

Some BIOSes allow you to pick which drive you want to boot from, so that you could do what you ask by just changing the setting in the BIOS.

Another alternative is to just open the case and move the data and power cable from one drive to another.

You can also use something like Virtual PC or VMWARE to have multiple OS's available so that you boot to the one you want.

Thnx to willy, proffitt and jmarchi for your extremely quick responses. Sorry for the lengthy question, but I was trying to make clear what I'm looking for, and I obviously failed.

I misled willy, I'm not trying to recover from a specific event. I want a general and permanent increase in capability. Physically swapping hard drives just doesn't cut it - too time consuming and damage-prone. Also, I don't want to convert to external easily swappable hard drives - too expensive.

Thanks for the references, though, I'll check them out. Google returns some interesting URLs for BIOS. As for Linux booting from another hard drive, isn't that done by having special software on C:? My Compaq BIOS doesn't allow anything but A:, C: or D: as the boot device.

Let me ask it another way. Does anyone know of someone who regularly does what I want? (Boot Windows 2000 from other than C: and without requiring C: to be available.) If so, how do they do it?

You would check at http://www.hp.com and see if they have a newer BIOS and then see if that helped. There are companies like http://www.mrbios.com/ but you may be not happy since such booting is not only an issue in the initial boot, but if the OS in question is coded to work in such an environment. Windows 95 being a prime example of only working off the primary ide master drive and just coughing up errors when the drive was moved to another connection and the primary ide left empty.

Maybe you don't need or want a PC? PCs are commodity items built for the millions with some limitations on what they do. Maybe some embedded card with an OS you wrote would work?

Look up Linux From Scratch as an example.

Bob

In reference to VMS world, if I remember right it would boot the #1 drive ID'ed as such. You could re-ID drive 1 by relocating the plug to another drive, thus it became a bootable provided it was bootable besides being mountable.

As for the windoze world it just doesn't work that way in the OS. There is or was a h/w fix in which you had drives physically mounted and in effect, swapped the ID for drive C via a switch, so if you had 3 drives, toggle the h/w switches you could swap drives that way. But, since you're looking for a cheap cure, I thought you'll find the cost acceptable provided it is available still. Further, sinc you have a Compaq system as noted you have the bios offering a limited boot sequence. Basically, to go further you need a custom bios to offer anything that's now available to newer mtrbds. But it will still look for drive C as it is physically attached via the HD cable. New bios boot paths are either a HD, USB device, or CD and SCSI devices. If you use SCSI, you can swap a bootable HD as well as its ID number, but it may try the 1st physical drive via HD cable to boot from then proceed to rest, again alot depends on the SCSI HD controller in this respect. In no way is your fix an easy one and you throw Linux in the mix, I offer no cure for it, I'm too hazy on that topic for a clear answer.

good luck -----Willy

Apparently rd400d77 does it all the time by choosing the hard drive to boot with in the BIOS setup. Precisely what I was hoping for. However, my BIOS (or something) thinks that D: is my CD-RW. Maybe I can get around that with a new BIOS???

Questions for rd400d77. How did you load the OS on your D: drive? Do you think you could load it by doing a restore from a backup of your C: drive? Could it be Windows 2000 or XP? Can you boot your D: drive with your C: drive physically disconnected?

-------------

Bob Proffitt suggests I may not want a PC. Much as I would like to revert to VMS and leave Windoze behind, that's not possible. Gates owns the world. I'm trying to extend what I already have with Windows 2000, not start over.

willy recalls VMS 20 years ago with unit select plugs from IBM 30 years ago. Things have changed. Now at boot time, a configurable default physical disk is used, but you have the option of selecting any other disk on the system. Of course, it must have a boot block and a viable OS on it. The logical name SYS points to the actual physical disk and all software looking for the boot disk simply addresses SYS. I'm hoping to find a similar BIOS-based solution.

Linnux is not an important goal, just an example of what one could do with the capability. All Linnux alternate boot schemes I have seen apparently are just variations on the dual-boot idea which requires a working OS in the C: drive and runs OS software components from the C: drive.

Apparently rd400d77 does it all the time by choosing the hard drive to boot with in the BIOS setup. Precisely what I was hoping for. However, my BIOS (or something) thinks that D: is my CD-RW. Maybe I can get around that with a new BIOS???

You can probably get around it by changing the device name for your CD/RW to another letter besides D and then changing your secondary drive to D. (uninstall and re-install is one way, something like partition magic is another). Then you can boot from C or D using that technique. My Compaq AP-550 workstation has more flexibility in the bios/post including scsii and network booting. Nice box and very cheap if you don't need high end CPU.

Part II

Bill Gates suckered me in the first time with Windows 2.11 (If youre reading this I still want my money back) with the promise of tomorrows interface today. Gem Desktop was better by the way Better than Win 3x and that was long before it) The whole idea that the OS would recognize hardware was exciting. But, after all these years I can now depress <CNTRL> <ALT> <DEL> from across the room with my eyeballs. Its frustrating that OS/hardware issues are still the bane of my existence.

But back to multiple hard drives. Well when Windows gets cluttered and it starts taking longer for Windows to boot than my old coffee maker to spit out a pot of go juice I revert to my thrilling days of yesteryear Format and start over. I do it on the TP just cause. It has the spare hard drive bay and instead of messing with CD coasters I just mirror over a few directories as a quick backup before I plop the restore CD in.

On the Athlon let me just say that I have three teenage boys. You have no idea the crap that finds it way onto that hard drive. Uh no dad I dont look at websites like thatI dont know why those popups keep happening or I didnt open any email attachments with a PIF extension.

In reality I always do the TP with BIOS. Its kinda weird when you put in the spare hard drive module (takes the place of the CD) if you just reboot it will reverse the drives and make the second hard drive C and the first D. Gets really weird when the drives have multiple partitions. Its easy to lose track of which drive is which.

Part IV (Final Chapter-The adventure begins)

Now back to your issue
>> Things have changed. Now at boot time, a configurable default physical disk is used, but you have the option of selecting any other disk on the system. . Get a new IDE cable just for giggles (theyre cheap) and double check the drive jumper pins. The BIOS should be able to see both drives pure and simple. If its making your CD/RW D it doesnt know that both drives are there. You cant have them both jumpered as Master (or both Slave for that matter)

Well kinda not really. You dont need a boot disk be it C or otherwise to load an OS. All you need to do is make sure that the BIOS knows where to look for the MBR that you want to use.

I would just install each OS while that hard drive was the only one connected. As far as using a backup to install that gets iffy. You can clone a good install, you can make an image of it like I do with Norton Ghost. But restore from a backup is more for data than code with many backup programs and won't cater to needs of certain files being in certain physical locations on the disk. You can run into some problems with some devious copy protection schemes. As you can tell from above I believe in lean installs ) Sure you can boot the D with C disconnected, but the OS will of course name it 'C'. Give them each a volumn label... George and Gracie or something so you tell them apart no matter how the OS labels them but get the cable and jumper thing taken care of first.

MrBIOS has been around for some 10 years. While I've never had to use them on any machine I've owned, some of my clients have. It's an interesting BIOS with plenty of adjustments you don't see elsewhere. Useful can be asked, but some want that to tinker with.

Why HP/Compaq offers a fairly stripped down BIOS is very simple. Support and document costs climb with every option you give the user base. To curb costs (and I'm guilty of doing this too in my software) we look at every screen and ask if any item can be set to a default value and removed from view.

Close to your issue is this example. With better than 99% of all home PC's with the hard disk being auto-detected, why offer any other setting in the BIOS? One could rip that off the screen and keep users from messing up the machine, the documentation and support costs reduce and there are less calls from people who disabled the hard disk.

Bob