Very complicated, please check inside for details

[teknophile]

OK...I just got a new 30GB 7200 rpm drive that i want to make my primary drive on my current system. Sounds simple enough. The catch is, I want to be able to keep my current drive as is and be able to boot up to either the new or old drive. Currently, I have a fresh install of win2k on the new drive and am set up to boot to either the new or old (win2k) drive. However, the old drive is set as primary master and the new drive is primary slave. I want to switch the current (old) drive to secondary master and make the new drive primary master. When I try to do this, I get the error "No Operating System" even though I have win2k installed on the new drive. Any ideas?

[tjaymadison]

You can only ever boot from the floppy drive, the hard drive attached as the primary master, or the CD-ROM drive unless you have an add-in controller or SCSI. There are ways to set up a dual-boot system for two different OS's, but you'll never get the system to boot from the secondary master. Was the Win2k install done on this PC or on another? Is the partition set to "active"?

[This message has been edited by tjaymadison (edited 04-08-2001).]

[Paleo Pete]

You might consider a removable drive setup. Removable drive bays are availabe that would be a very simple solution. While shut down, pull one drive, put the other in. Make sure BIOS is set to autodetect. I don't think they are very expensive either.

Otherwise, you have some serious tinkering to do, and will probably need to create a multi boot menu. If you have a few buck$ to invest, it might just save you lots of headaches. Dual Booting Windows 2000 (http://www.zdnet.com/zdhelp/stories/main/0,5594,2430684,00.html) might have some good info. Windows 2000 Home Page (http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/default.asp) Not sure, but it might have some links...

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[teknophile]

The win2k install on the old drive was done over win98. I then installed the second drive (formatted and partitioned yada yada) and installed win2k on the new drive (primary slave) while running off of the old drive. Now I have a dual boot to either the new or old drive. But whatever I do, I can't boot up when the new drive is in the primary master position. It seems to not recognize the OS. There are two primary partitions on the new drive (G and H) with win2k on H. I noticed that H was bootable but was not the active partition so I changed that but still could not boot.

I went through some of the info on boot sectors and such and it seems that the new drive may not have a boot sector for the bios to recognize at bootup, but I don't know how to create a boot sector on that drive.

Maybe I'll just have to (gulp!) suck it in, backup everything, and start from scratch. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/eek.gif

[tjaymadison]

There may be two logical partitions on the drive, but for DOS/Windows only the first one is the primary, and you must have the OS there for the drive to be bootable. Just setting H: as active won't work. FDISK creates the master boot record, so you really don't have any control over it once you specify the partition arrangement. You can replace a defective MBR with the backup copy, but that's about it. It just seems to me that you're going to have a ton of trouble trying to maintain the integrity of two bootable drives by swapping them back and forth, if I'm understanding your intentions right. What will happen every time you install new software or especially hardware? If all you want to do is have the second drive be a copy of the first, you might want to consider running a program like Norton Ghost, Drive2Drive or DriveCopy every so often to "clone" the main drive. Or you could get a RAID controller and "mirror" one drive to the other, but that's more complicated and more expensive. For a complete reference on this matter, see this section of The PC Guide (http://pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/struct.htm) -- it might help you with the underlying theory. Good Luck! http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif

[pavermech]

I may be coming down with foot-in-mouth disease but here goes. First if the new drive has a G and H partition, why install win2k on H? Wouldn't it boot if install on G (primary) partition?
Also, there is a program by Power Quest called Boot Magic that is supposed to dual boot an o/s from any partition. Although I have never used it and don't know how well it works, I have used the companion program Partion Magic and it seems to work well. It will ask you when you create a partion if it is to have an o/s installed on it. I accidently activated Boot Magic one time and I do know that it will ask you what o/s do you want to boot when you start up (or restart, very annoying untill I found out how to shut it up!) Anyway, hope that you got some ideas from all my ramblings. Good luck. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif

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[This message has been edited by pavermech (edited 04-09-2001).]