Re: How to boot Windows XP from the primary slave IDE channel
- From: "Timothy Daniels" <TDaniels@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2005 16:47:19 -0700
<pjbondi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Laptop hard drives must be the master IDE device.
I am not familiar with laptops, but this is not true
for desktops, and I don't believe it's true for the
IDE standard spec either. Are you sure about that,
and what do you base your belief on?So I needed a way to boot Windows from the primary slave drive.
Windows can boot from NEITHER the primary slave NOR the secondary slave without using a boot loader like GRUB.
This is not true for Windows XP as the OS's boot
loader can reside on *any* partition in *any* HD.
Firstly, the HD containing the boot loader (ntldr), the
boot menu (boot.ini), and ntdetect.com be at the
head of the BIOS's HD boot order. The *default* HD
for this is the Master HD on IDE channel 0.
But by keyboard input, the user can put *any* HD in
the system at the head of the BIOS's HD boot order.
Except for that DEFAULT arrangement of the BIOS's
HD boot order, there are no other consquences of a
HD being jumpered Master or Slave - the boot files
can just as easily be on a Slave HD, and the OS can
just as easily reside on a Slave HD. Secondly, that head HD must have an MBR and the above
mentioned files must be in a partition marked "active",
and that partition must have a boot sector. These
requirements are already met in all Win2K/NT/XP OSes
that "boot". Then, the partition containing the mentioned boot files
(called by MS the "system" partition, believe it or not),
can load the OS from *any* other partition in the system -
even from a logical parition (as opposed to a primary
partition). All that is necessary is that the "system"
partition's boot.ini file contain an entry pointing to the
partition in the system that that contains the OS. That
partition containing the OS is called the "boot" partition
by MS, believe it or not, and its entry can be selected
at boot time by keyboard input or by time-out. So, assuming you could have both HDs recognized by
the BIOS, all you had to do to load an OS from the
2nd HD was to add an entry to the boot.ini file in the
OS running from the primary HD that pointed to the
2nd OS. This, in all likelyhood, would have only involved
copying the 1st entry and changing "rdisk(0)" to "rdisk(1)".
These are all part of the details involved in dual booting
or multi-booting.*TimDaniels*
.
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