2 hdrives, 1 pc

[jdublu]

I'm just trying different things. I installed 2 hdrives, both with 98se in a emachines 333k, 256mb ram, nothin special.
BIOS has settings for boot up for a choice of 4 hdrives, floppy, cdrom,,etc...
I chose #1-floppy #2-hdrive and #3-cdrom. It only gives u a choice of one or the other. I installed 2 hdrives. what I'm trying to do is have both of them appear at boot up so I'll have a choice of which one I want to boot to.
how can this be done?
thanx, Jim

[Nirvana]

I'm not sure why you would want to have a choice to boot to the same operating system on two drives.
You have 2 choices
1. do a fresh install of the operating system
2. modify the boot file.

1. go through setup normally but when windows ask you for a destination choose your slave drive. windows will make the necessary changes to your boot file and you will have a choice at start-up.

2. i've never done this myself so i ask others and search the forum on how to modify the boot.ini

Just make sure you have all your jumpers set correctly and bios correctly configured and it should be no problem.

[jdublu]

i know it looks weird having the same os on both drives but this is just "experimenting". the only other os i have to install on another hdrive is 95, so 98se works better even if it's on both hdrives

[Panama Red]

You could buy a copy of Partition Magic which comes with Boot Magic. Boot Magic would let you pick which drive, I think. Although, it looks for multiple os's on a system. Not sure how it would handle two copies of the same os

[GaryRouth]

Boot Magic might be able to boot two different instances of Windows 98 (it does so by tricks such as hiding partitions - because most Win9x OS's need to have all OS and parition information in the mbr of the first drive - without a 3rd party bootloader, only one instance of each 9x would be possible) You can read all about it over at the PowerQuest site. The manual is at http://www.powerquest.com/documentation/guides/pm8enug.pdf Boot Magic is about 2/3 down on the menu.

I know of installations that keep two alike versions of NT/2000/XP OS's on a system = one is a "test" platform, and one is a "production" platform (one might be called XP test, the other XP production, for example). I haven't seen it done in the Win9x world, but I imagine with Boot Magic's help, it could be done.

The Linux bootloader Grub would probably do the trick also.
. . . Gary

[. . . since I don't know your level of computer knowledge, I suppose I should mention that there's no need for an operating system on each hard drive. I'm guessing you know that already, but I figure better safe than sorry. . . .also, I noticed that this is your first post here: Welcome to the Pc Mechanic forums ]

[jdublu]

I'm curious, how can a hard drive be used when there is no os on it, because if you do, like I have 98se on both of them, how can it be read, because it would be the same setup as I have right now? if u have 2 drives and you boot to the primary master, how do u get to the other one with nothing on it?

[andyms18a]

windows will treat the other hard drive as a second drive you can install programs and data on it just like the main hard drive each drive is given a drive letter from c witch is normaley the boot drive with windows on right up to z so you can have up to 24 hard drives or partitions with no problams if you have a cd rom or dvd it will get a drive letter as well if you dont need 2 copys of windows then boot up the computer open the my computer folder on the desk top dubble click the D drive and copy any data you want to the C drive then close the folder open my computer and right click the D drive and select format and it will deleat all info from that drive so you can start useing it