Can you pick the HD you want to boot from?

[Liam]

Hello I'm wondering if there is a way of picking the hd to boot from without messing with the bios.
I have a friend that wants to add a 2nd Hd to the system to be used only by the kids.
Both Hd would need their own o/s so they can work independently, so the kids can't mess up his HD. So if do some corruption they would screw up only 1 HD.

Thanks Liam

[TigerStrike]

You would probably need someone to write a custom autoexec.bat to direct you to one of the two drives. I know you can run the OS from a drive other than C: (done it in fact) but I have never tried to run 2.

[Nathan]

Most of the modern BIOS support booting to different Partitions (or hard drives). But protecting them from other users at the same time while booting to the different hard drive, well...

[Mntsnow]

Liam,

Yes you can do what you want WITHOUT messing with the bios by using a couple of programs out there. I personally would recommend Partition Magic from Powerquest as with it also comes with a program called PQBOOT. with it you will have a screen comeup when you first boot the computer (like if you had NT and Windows installed) that lets you choose what OS/partition to use. and with Partition magic you can "hide" selected harddrives/partitions from either OS that you have on the computer.....I have used this on my server that I have NT4.0 Server and Win98 on.When in NT I can't "see/access" Windows partitions and viaversa unless I use the powerquest software to "unhide" the drive/partition.

So your other software on other drives/partitions can be safe and sound.

Good luck

Mntsnow http://www.sysopt.com/forum/biggrin.gif

[Ed_S]

Easier & more foolproof way would be to get removable racks for the HDs. Then just swap when kids are using. No way they can "mess up" his HD if it's out entirely!

Have been using these quite some time now, they're great!

[finger51]

why not just different log on's? make an account for the kids that gives them limited access to the settings for the machine.
I could be wrong but that would seem the easier way than mucking about in the BIOS or installing 2 OS's.

[DSEG]

couple of ways but depends on your hardware. as previously said you can alter the boot order in the bios to boot from c first or D, E, F and so on but obviously that would give them access to the bios which could cause all kinds of problems.

Giving someone a different login doesnt help at all .... what about running a dos box and then deleting something from a different folder or partition.... you get really in to and load NT and you could make your machine dual boot and your NT partition could be made NTFS (NT File System) and would be totally invisible to windows95 or win98. I came across a boot program called SYSTEM COMMANDO which organises your booting and can include passwords to stop anyone booting in to you drive. Admittedly you would still have to have NT running NTFS but at least it would be secure. not to mention faster with enough ram