Disabling a 2nd bootable hard drive in a nForce 2 Motherboard

[videobruce]

Details;
nForce2 motherboard (Abit NF7-S V2),
XP Pro w/ sp3 (but I doubt it matters),
IDE hard drives on the same bus,
Non RAID setup,
SATA ports not used,2nd IDE channel has a Optical drive on it.

There is the entry in the Bios to set any of the four IDE devices to "None", but doing so has no affect upon the next boot in the Bios. The drives still show up in the boot screen, so I doubt it's a Windows issue.

I have two bootable drives (1st partition each), and want to isolate one or the other (only on occasion) for different reasons, but I would rather not go through the hassle of opening up the case and pulling th cable(s). :mad:

Anyone else have this issue?

[FTT]

I'm not entirely understanding what it is you want to be able to do.

I used to have 2 drives with one OS on each (98SE on both, and later 98SE + ME and later on from then, 98SE with XP). To boot from one or the other all I needed to do was go into BIOS and change which hard drive to boot from in the boot order such as HDD0 first with HDD1 second, or the opposite, HDD1 then HDD0. This effectively gave me a choice of OS'es but both drives were accessible once loaded, it was just that 'C:/' was one or the other and D:/ was the second drive as data only. This did not matter where it was located on the ide cable(s). There also was the choice of HDD2 and HDD3 if there were that many drives attached.

I never tried disabling either drive in BIOS. I assume you want one drive invisible to the other without physically disconnecting it?

[videobruce]

I never tried disabling either drive in BIOS. I assume you want one drive invisible to the other without physically disconnecting it?
Correct. Changing the boot order is no issue. Hiding/disabling the drive is. The Bios ignores the "None" state setting of that drive that was set in the Bios. It sees the drive no matter what.

I'm assuming it's some lame flaw in the Bios firmware (possible because of age) and hoped someone had a workaround.