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Disabling Primary HD in BIOS

P

Poontos

Platinum Member
Instead of physically unplugging the HD or power cable for my primary HD, would there be any harm in disabling the HD in the BIOS, so the drive letters do not conflict and I could boot off the second HD just as if I had unplugged the power cable on the primary HD?

E.g. Screw up re-detection of the HD? Need a reset of ESCD config? Any other probs?

Thank you!
 
I don't see any problem. But there's an easier solution if you need to boot to a secondary drive.

Look in your BIOS settings for a boot sequence setting. Set the first boot setting to "HDD-1" (that's what it's called on Award BIOSes, at least). That way, you'll boot from the secondary drive and still have access to the first one as a D: drive.
 
This may work but it really depends on your motherboard's bios to make it function, also w/ the Primary HDD disabled you shouldn't really have a slave on the primary channel because if you disable the primary HDD it may cause problems w/ the Slave, also you need to make sure the boot order is setup correctly in the bios once the primary master is disabled... but as a side note w/ a K7S5A I was able to boot off the primary Slave even if the Primary master is disabled in the bios, (both drives are set to cable select) hope this helps....
 
When both HD's are plugged in at the same time in the default configuration, the Primary-Master boots up as normal and I just use some of the partitions on the Primary-Slave (second and only other HD) for data, but the second HD is bootable into Win98SE -- if I were to unplugged the Primary-Master, of course. I want to keep the data and the OS on the second drive completely seperate.

I have many partitions (this will not change, so...) and the drive letters will become messed up temporarily if I the HD's are both setup in the default configuration when I change the boot HDD-1, HDD-2 order in the BIOS. Win98SE off the second drive will of course not boot in this scenario.

Hardware:

Epox 8KHA+ VIA K266A based mobo. Second newest bios.
WD 80GB 8MB
IBM 60GXP 40GB

 
not sure if this will work but here's how I would do it, Make sure both drives are set to cable select, when you want to boot off the primary slave enter the bios, disable the primary master and make IDE 1 the first boot device, this means you should be able to acess everything on the 2nd drive and nothing from the first drive, but the bios needs to still detect both drive even if you have the primary master disabled, not sure if your motherboard will do that, you'll have to check by trial and error. Also, if you want acess to both drives you need to dual boot which isn't that hard and you can prolly add 98SE to the boot loader by editing the boot.ini if your running 2k/XP as your primary OS
 
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