OT: 'Puter Q-How to boot to 2 OS HDS?

Also, Google "dual boot"

The 95 HDD is slaved to C JR Dweller in the cellar

JR North wrote:

As I thought, the posted article says you can't do that. What you CAN do, if the BIOS allows it is, to flip the drives so D: becomes the first in the string. It may be an advanced setting, or your box may be too old. Alternative, get removable IDE drive bays, put the drives in the sleds and swap as needed. If you use Cable Select, you can swap positions in the string easily. I've been doing that for years. Also makes image backups dead easy. You might be able to jigger the Linux bootloader to do what you want and I think there's been at least one multi-boot piece of shareware out there. The problem with multi-boot is that if the first drive fries, you get to reinstall not just that one but fix up two installs. One reason I do image backups is to avoid doing just that.

Or you can run Virtual PC on XP or later and run whatever OS you like inside, simultaneously, if you like. It's got some gotchas, like limited hardware access, but is adequate for a lot of things.

Stan

The MS Windows, and I think MS DOS, are hardwired to boot from the first sector on the "C:" disk.

John D. (johnbslocombatgmaildotcom)

Somebody has to say it...get a newer MB on Ebay for $20

When my 386 board failed under warranty, the technician gave my instructions how to fix it. In broken Chinglesh he told me to remove the harness and the screws on the board then told me to carefully lift it out at a certain angle and when I finished he said: "Now, trowww it awayyyyy!"

If you run Linux the installer probably set things up so you can boot either the MS system or Linux. If not it is rather simple to configure the Grub loader to do it as you can boot Linux from any disk.

(I don't understand why the guy wants to load "ME" or "95" anyway :-)

John D. (johnbslocombatgmaildotcom)

Do you have an old DOS start-up floppy with fdisk on it? If so, you might be able to go into fdisk, make the 'D' drive active, and then it should boot from the D...that was 'should', no guarantees as we're talking Micro$oft and old computer components.

Mike

That's basically what some of the multi-boot apps did, play with the partition tables. Not my cup of tea, but somebody liked it... If you do it, make sure you've got the partition tables backed up somewhere else.

Stan

Some older but useful hardware runs under it. I keep a Win ME computer for my scanner and OCR software. It's on my home network, so I can scan and convert documents, then move them to another computer. It also has the backup files for several websites & the FTP software. It isn't used to browse the web or any other online application.

DPDT switch attached to Master/Slave jumpers, one way jumpers the master on one drive and the slave on the other, and vice versa for the other switch position.

That will work on a old computer, but most newer IDE drives I see are set up as Cable Select.

Most versions of Linux have a multi-partition boot routine you can install, even if you don't run Linux. They'll find and flag any bootable partition, then allow you to select the partition at boot time.

LLoyd

If they are on two physically different drives, you can hook up a DPDT switch to the master/slave jumper on each drive.

The switch is attached to the front of the computer, and when the computer is off, you flip the switch to select which drive you wish to boot to. When you turn on the computer, the drive you want to boot into becomes the master drive, and you boot into that OS. The switch has no effect once the computer has booted.

I ran with this setup for a couple years dual booting W2k/WXP (before I "had" to switch over to XP). Worked great.

Of course, with W95/W98, you might be able to just use a boot floppy.

Jon

I set up a DOS boot floppy with COMSPEC =3D C:\DOS\COMMAND.COM in the Autoexec.bat so I could remove the floppy.

You could write a batch file named "95.bat" that runs D:\..\WIN.COM to start Win 95 from the DOS prompt, or automatically.

I never played with ME.

jsw

Sound like a job for Smart Boot Manager

download sbminst.exe put a diskette in drive A: then from a DOS/Command Prompt window enter: sbminst -t us -d 0 to copy the files to the floppy.

Set your BIOS to boot from floppy and when it boots you'll be given a choice of which drive to boot from. Screenshots on the website.

Steve