Scsi - Ide Hd

[and2]

Hi,

I have a SCSI HD that I use as my boot disk. I stored programs only in that drive, so it runs fast. I have an external USB IDE HD which I'd like to put in the PC as the 2nd HD. This HD is used to store my documents. Will this work? I heard that when there are SCSI and IDE HDs in a system, it will boot only from IDE?

Thanks.

[Paul Komski]

It will mostly depend on your bios and whether you can select SCSI in preference to IDE in the boot order. Booting to USB devices is problematic at the best of times and will probably not cause a complication since iF your BIOS is recent enough to support booting to USB then it probably has a specific SCSI option into the bargain.

Check your BIOS setup and just try it out. The mixing of SCSI/IDE boot devices was mostly an older problem. If there are boot conflicts another workaround is to ensure there is no boot partition on the USB device; easiest achieved by only having logical partitions on the USB drive.

[and2]

Thanks for the reply Paul. Sorry, guess I wasn't that clear describing the situation. The external HD is actually just an IDE HD that I put in an external enclosure. So with this clarification I'm sure your answer will be different.

[Paul Komski]

No the answer's the same. What is important is where and how the device is connected. To an IDE, USB, Firewire or even to a SATA port. By putting it in a USB enclosure it becomes, in effect, a "USB Device". How it is handled depends mostly on the BIOS on the motherboard and any firmware on your hardware. On older BIOS you could often not even discriminate between a SCSI and IDE bootable device, which is when two different types of bootable devices should not be mixed.

[and2]

OK, thanks for the answer. Will update what I'll encounter.