My OS is WinXP Home and I have System Commander installed. I have 2 internal hard-drives on my computer. Windows sees the first hard-drive as Disk 0 and the second one as Disk 1. System Commender sees them as Drive 0 and Drive 1. This afternoon I put on an external hard-drive using a USB cable. Problem is, I can't do anything with that external drive with System Commander. I can work with it in Windows. I put an extended partition on the drive and then a logical DOS drive which Windows named Drive J:. I even copied some files to it. But if I go into System Commander it actually shows a button for each disk which it calls: Drive 0, Drive 1, and drive 2. Drive 2 is the external drive. But the button for Drive 2 is grayed out and I can't do anything with it. It will show the button but not the usual columns it usually shows for the drives. :confused:

according to this (http://www.linguistsoftware.com/syscom.htm) System Commander works within active partitions only. Probably active primaries as well.

Note, however, that you cannot run the programs installed in the other partitions unless you install them into the active partition.

I don't know if it will help but what do you find so useful about the program? Just curious... :)

Supports IDE hard drives, and any SCSI hard drives that are accessible at boot time (most are); USB and Firewire drives are often not supported by the BIOS;

System Commander works within active partitions only I dont think so - SC can work with any partitions on any drives it can access.

Note, however, that you cannot run the programs installed in the other partitions This is nothing to do with SC and is I think just badly worded. It is generally the case (even though it is not ubiquitous) that you have to install programs into the current OS before you can use them; i.e it is generally no good accessing program files installed by other operating systems in a multiboot environment.

RE NON ATA "VOLUMES"
I would think that greying the USB is likely to be a BIOS reporting thing since there can be problems with SCSI, USB and FIRWIRE as well as with RAID - all being related to what the BIOS supports and/or SCSI/SCSI emulation. Flashing the BIOS might update things but the only reference I have seen that tried this resulted in an inaccessible laptop - the choice is yours.

SC is a very useful and easy to use utility. I personally dont like it because it wants to "nanny me" and is expensive - but it is a powerful and versatile partitioning and boot management application.

Out of interest does your own bios setup allow any usb boot options.

[QUOTE=Paul Komski
Out of interest does your own bios setup allow any usb boot options.[/QUOTE]
I'm not sure, Paul. I'm going to have to take a look at it tomorrow.

[QUOTE=Paul Komski
RE NON ATA "VOLUMES"
I would think that greying the USB is likely to be a BIOS reporting thing since there can be problems with SCSI, USB and FIRWIRE as well as with RAID - all being related to what the BIOS supports and/or SCSI/SCSI emulation. Flashing the BIOS might update things but the only reference I have seen that tried this resulted in an inaccessible laptop - the choice is yours.



[/QUOTE]
I think you're correct on that, Paul. I even deleted the logical drive and deleted the extended partition, and then made it a primary partition. It solved nothing. I'm not going to flash the BIOS. As you mentioned, it can cause problems. I've read before that if you flash the BIOS, if things go wrong it can be a big problem. However, it's still serving it's purpose as I use it to copy my important data files to it. I think it's a good idea to copy some of your important files to a removable media.