Booting to secondary hard drive

[popperjoe]

Hello,
i would appreciate some advice on how to configure my pc to enable me to boot toalternative hard drives. I have an 80gb drive that is set as master and has windows xp on it. I also have a 20gb drive that is sey as slave and has windows 98 on it. These 2 drives are connected to IDE 1 on my mother board. I also have a DVD drive and a CD drive set as master and slave, which are connected to IDE 2. I would like to have the option of running win xp or wind 98 because i have some old software that will not run in xp.

I cannot see an option in BIOS to boot to master or slave, only IDE 1 or IDE 2. (or flopy or CD rom obviously)

Do i need to change the configuration around so that the 2 hard drives are masters and the CD and DVD are slaves to these 2? I could then select to boot to IDE 1 or IDE 2 in the BIOS. Problem then is if I ever want to boot to the CD?

Any advice would be welcome.

Regards,
Dave.

[MrAustin]

Look into BootMagic, it's a neat little program that gives you a bootloader each time you start the computer and lets you choose. I don't know the specifics of it, as I use lilo which comes with Linux.

[RayH]

You have a couple of options. The traditional option is to get a boot manager. This will allow you to select the OS that you want to boot. There are free boot managers, just do a search for it.

The other option is one I would recommend, that is do not use a boot manager. Understand that the computer will boot to the first hard drive it finds.

You can put both your hard drives on the same cable as CS (1,2). Put the W98 drive as CS 2. The WXP would be CS 1. But that drive would be in a hot swap box.

A hot swap box is a box that sits in a CD ROM bay. It works like those old fashioned car stereos that people used to remove.

When you want to boot to XP, leave the box in. When you want to boot to 98, just pull the WXp drive hot box out. Do this before you boot.

This will save a lot of hassle if you have to reload your OS or decide to get rid of one of them. Really.

The boxes are cheap. Maybe $12:

http://www.pricewatch.com/1/74/3114-1.htm