Multiple Hard Disks

[Nadeem]

Hi...

I've 2 hard disks in my computer, can I make both of them bootable? Is there anyway I can be prompted to select the hard disk to boot from?. OS is not the question at this point, it may or may not be the same.

Any suggestion/idea will be highly appreciated.

Thanks,


Nadeem

[Steve R Jones]

http://www.wugnet.com/articles/multiboot/mboot.html

Article: How to DUAL-BOOT
Win95 and Win98
..and even TRIPLE-BOOT Win95-Win98 & NT 4.0!

[mourikise]

Hi,

There are boot managers that will allow you to do such a thing. But, if you want something more specific (eg. Windows + Linux) then you can use the Linux's boot manager (LILO) and thus you won't need any extra software. Another solution, not so efficient though, is each time you boot to change the BIOS settings "boot from" to the desired HD.

[hoods2]

This might help,never used it. But it looks like what your looking for. http://www.xosl.org/

[Nadeem]

Hi,

Thank you very much for all your replies. The few suggested methods are good to have the multiple OS in one PC, but in these cases system will boot only from the Primary Master HD. My requirement is some what different. I want BOTH of my hard disks to be bootable, independently (in case I just take the 2nd HD and put it in some other computer as a master HD, it should be able to boot there).

XOSL (http://www.xosl.org/) seems to be useful and I'm going to try this one, I'll let you guys know about the final result.

Nadeem

[OuTpaTienT]

Well, you can use fdisk to do what you're asking (I believe).

One of your drives is already set to be the bootdrive. If you want your 2nd HD to also be capable of being a bootdrive (for example, if you remove it and pop it in a computer that doesn't have a HD) then do this:

Shuffle anything you want to keep to the 1st HD because you'll need to format the 2nd one.
-Then disconnect the 1st HD, and boot with a boot-floppy.

-Do an FDISK and set the drive as a bootable partition.

-Reformat the drive making sure to use the switch to copy system files to the drive. I believe it's /S

-Reconnect the 1st HD.

Now the 2nd drive will be bootable BUT only if it's the only drive connected or it's in the master position. You won't be able to choose between the two at bootup, I'm really not sure if there is a way to do that.

[tantone]

Might want to be careful about swapping drives on systems like that, unless you'll be swapping the drive into an identical system.

[Nadeem]

Hi again,

Thanks for some additional suggestions. Last night, I 'achieved' the objective. Now, I've 2 HDs and CAN choose the option to boot from. Here is a summry of what exactly I did:

- I formated my 2nd HD (actually it was a brand new HD, so I didn't need to shift the data) with /S, to make it bootable.
- Removed my 1st HD
- Installed the OS in the 2nd HD (in this case same as 1st HD i.e. Win95)
- Put back the 1st HD
- and finally, installed XOSL (I selected 2nd HD to install on)... that's all

Next time when I rebooted my computer, it asked where I wanted to boot from, so now I've the option to select 1st or 2nd HD to boot from. A good thing about this is if I select to boot from 2nd HD, it will change it's letter to C, so if I install anything on 2nd HD, the reference driver letter will still be the C (which is useful in case I move this HD to another PC as a Primary Master HD).

Next, I'll be trying to install a different OS (Linux) on the 2nd partition of my 2nd HD. I believe that shouldn't be a problem. Once again, I thank for your suggestions.

Nadeem

[drojman]

Thanks for the post to http://www.xosl.org/
Thats a great piece of software! I was about to post the exact same question. It works great!