Re: XP elsewhere needs files on 1st partitoin primary master?
From: dmorgan1 (dmorgan-with-suffixed-"1"-ATdslextreme.com)
Date: 01/24/05
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Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 22:22:36 -0800
Thanks. I got it to work by forcing the issue with trickery.
Temporarily, I disconnected the main primary master drive (which I
don't want XP to touch), and rejumpered the slave drive to master. I
installed XP on the drive under those circumstances, preventing XP
from fulfilling its instinct to write to the other drive by
eliminating it. XP installs normally, boots, runs.
Then I put things back-- jumpered the XP drive to slave again and
reconnected the original master. Only worry I had was that XP would
trip on the fact that its drive is no longer master. That problem was
at first overcome using your BIOS suggestion. My BIOS lets me direct
booting to the slave drive, making it, for booting if not wiring
purposes, "first." When I do that, Windows comes up fine, sees its
partition as letter "C" and away we go. Problem then is, I can't
conveniently boot my OS on the master. Could do with a floppy but
that's ugly. I found a bootloader that can do, I guess, the same thing
as that BIOS setting in software. Bootloader is GRUB, which has a
"map" command that "performs a virtual swap between your first and
second hard drive." More if you're interested at
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/html_node/DOS-Windows.html#DOS%2fWindows
One uncertainty. I understand that the PC architecture, not any OS,
is responsible for the decision to choose where to boot from. But I
think it chooses "the MBR on the first hard drive." What happens
beyond that is entirely up to whatever arbitrary code is in that MBR.
"What the first sector of the boot disk does is entirely up to whoever
programmed that code." The OS-independent phase of booting stops
short of saying anything about active (or other) partitions. Maybe the
MBR code has something to say about an active partition on the first
hard drive or maybe not. The code that DOS and Windows put there when
you install them does. That code takes special and central interest in
the active partition on the first drive. But that is beyond the
OS-independent part of the booting sequence. It's on the OS side of
the line, and is a Microsoft thing. Counterexamples: 1) Linux
installed elsewhere than the active partition of the first drive makes
no use of that partition. 2) Faked out (as describe above), neither
does XP on my machine now. ntldr and friends are currently NOT
situated in the active partition of the first drive. They're in the
first partiton of the second drive. And XP boots whole and fine from
there.
On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 21:39:22 +0200, "cquirke (MVP Win9x)"
<cquirkenews@nospam.mvps.org> wrote:
>On Fri, 21 Jan 2005 16:15:44 -0800, dmorgan1
>
>>Hmmm.. the only partition marked active was the
>>first-partition-of-primary-master. I unmarked it, then deleted it
>>altogether. Then I marked active my desired XP installation target,
>>first-partition-of-primary-slave.
>
>>Apparently XP *MUST* utilize that first-partition-of-primary-master,
>>no matter we want it elsewhere.
>
>This is not an OS issue, but a system-level issue that the OS must
>conform to. Traditional BIOS design will always boot the active
>primary partition on the first HD it sees. Modern BIOS may change
>this via CMOS settings, but should an OS rely on this?
>
>When you first turn on the PC, there is no OS, not should there be.
>There is only the system code (BIOS).
>
>Just as an OS is there to run any number of possible applications, so
>it is that a system is there to run any number of possivle operating
>systems. A PC that can only run Windows is as unreasonable as an OS
>that can only run, say, MS Office.
>
>So when the system boots, it finds and boots an OS by following a
>standard procedure. Any OS that wants to be PC-compatible has to fit
>that procedure, and that means it has to start from the active
>partition on the first hard drive.
>
>That doesn't mean it has to be installed in that partition; it can
>start a small stub of code that can cross over to a different
>partition to load the rest of the OS.
>
>That's what is happening here, and all MS OSs work in this way.
>
>MS-DOS can start from C:\IO.SYS, C:\MSDOS.SYS and C:\Command.com, and
>locate the rest of DOS via an entry in the Path statement. You can
>relocate or replace Command.com via a statement in Config.sys
>
>Win9x can do the same as MS-DOS, by setting variables in the now-text
>C:\MSDOS.SYS (or overriding C:\Winboot.ini); once again, only a
>handful of files (under 5M) need to be on C:
>
>NT can do the same sort of thing, though the filenames involved are
>different. The first file started in NT (and Win2000 and XP) is
>C:\NTLDR, and this processes C:\BOOT.INI; the second file can tell the
>boot code to look elsewhere for the rest of the OS. So once again,
>all but the first 5M or so files can be off C:
>
>You may be alble to tell BIOS, via CMOS settings boot order, to treat
>something else as the "first hard drive in the system". This
>generally works when it's choosing SCSI before IDE, or S-ATA before
>UIDE. It may or may not work when choosing a particular drive within
>these interfaces, e.g. IDE primary slave before primary master.
>
>That's because the OS has to understand what is going on. It likely
>understands one interface before another, but may still assume an
>order of devices within that interface.
>
>I've covered this sort of stull in the section on multi-booting at
>http://cquirke.mvps.org
>
>
>>--------------- ----- ---- --- -- - - -
> Error Messages Are Your Friends
>>--------------- ----- ---- --- -- - - -
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