Is it possible to boot from my Secondary IDE hard drive (secondary master) by changing boot-up order in bios?

[rnmcd]

I have WinXP Pro loaded on my Primary Master IDE hard drive and Win 98SE loaded on my Secondary Master IDE hard drive and was wondering if I can change my bios to boot from the SECONDARY IDE?

From time to time I want to access a program that I have on my Win98SE drive and I think it would be quicker to get Win98SE to boot by changing my bios setting (if it is possible) than to open up my box and switch the cables around.

Thanks.

 

[GroundZero]

if your bios will allow you to select the second drive in the boot order of the boot search this will work.
on another note, i run both of these os's on my machine at home and when i boot the pc it gives me a choice as to wich os i want to boot
to. i have 1 100 gig drive partitioed into 4 25 gig partitions. (c,d,e,f) with 98se on the c partition and xp pro on the f drive.
i don't see why this should be any different than two separate hdd's.

 

[Kwatt]

I do something similar sometimes.

Just go into BIOS at startup and disable PRIMARY IDE.

You will then boot from the MASTER drive on the SECONDARY IDE interface.

Kwatt

 

[corkyg]

Kwatt has it right. I boot from my primary or secondary by a simple key switch. I put both drives in mobile racks - each is key switchable. On my new computer I am using Romtec's TRIOS II - that allows me to select from any of 3 drives by pressing a button. Very cool! Check it out - the very slickest way to go . . . Trios II

 

[rnmcd]

corky-g, do you mean that GroundZero has the right idea. Kwatt doesn't use a switch, he goes into bios.

GroundZero- what software give you the option to choose which drive to boot from?

 

[minendo]

Why not just edit your boot.ini file in XP and set the default OS to Win98?

 

[GroundZero]

the software i use for this was in xp pro.
gave me the option of setting up multiple os's when i installed xp pro.