Anyone know if Promise/Maxtor ATA100 or 133 cards let you pick which IDE channel on the card to boot off of?

[kevman]

I've been trying to find an PCI IDE controller card that let's me do this. So far my current one Promise Ultra 66 Does not let you pick which IDE Channel on the card to boot off. But someone told me the new ones do let you do that. can anyone confirm this?

 

[Mday]

well, it's not that the card picks which channel, it's which partition is made the "Active" partition.

 

[kly1222]

Yeah, but kevman probably wants several active partitions on his controller card with the option to choose which to boot off from.

I'm sorry, but my promise ultra 100 doesn't let me decide....it just goes down the list (p. master, p. slave, s. master, s. slave) until it finds an active partition.

 

[kevman]

Thanks, that's all I needed to know. I wanted to be able to get in the promise card's bios and chose which way to boot weather it's primary master on it or secondary master on it. Oh well, I heard taht SIIG cards let you do that, but now sure of their quality.

Kevin

 

[JohnnyPC]

I would think that it's more of a function of the main bios. I had a system that I used as a test bed and would sometimes have 3-4 hard drives all with "primary active partitions" o them from being in other systems. I could then go into my BIOS and under the boot sequence selection, pick which particular HD to boot from. I dont think this is a universal type of bios option since some systems that I wanted to this on would only allow the generic CD FLOPPY IDE0 IDE1 options. I don't think that there's going to be a product available that would meet your requirements since if you don't have this prefrred type of BIOS option for booting, then your limited to the traditional sequence of primary master etc...

 

[kevman]

<< I would think that it's more of a function of the main bios. I had a system that I used as a test bed and would sometimes have 3-4 hard drives all with "primary active partitions" o them from being in other systems. I could then go into my BIOS and under the boot sequence selection, pick which particular HD to boot from. I dont think this is a universal type of bios option since some systems that I wanted to this on would only allow the generic CD FLOPPY IDE0 IDE1 options. I don't think that there's going to be a product available that would meet your requirements since if you don't have this prefrred type of BIOS option for booting, then your limited to the traditional sequence of primary master etc... >>



My idea of what I'm looking for is something like what my mother board lets me do. For example, in my Asus P3B-f I can disble either one of the onboard IDE channels if I wanted to. So If I disabled my primary, the secondary would be on and I can boot my WinME system from that hard drive. I want a card that would let me disable one channel or the other.