Manual Selection of PC HD

[Gareth123]

I have a PC that I use to connect to various external systems i.e house alarm, Air Con PLC type control system and model railway DCC system. Each external requires a differant op system. The house alarm system works with XP, it should work with Vista but after trying various modem cards Vista will not connect, I don't have win 7. The Aircon control system requires NT4 (because of the Security Dongle) and the Railway system uses good old DOS.

I have a number of spare HDs which I can utilise so is there a way of manually selecting which HD is used to boot up? I have tried Dual Booting but I would like to be able to switch select the boot HD so the the PC would then auto boot to the selected HD.

 

[Reloadron]

The short answer is no. The best option would be a multi-boot system. The reason is the BIOS determines the boot drive, therefore on every boot you would need to enter the BIOS and choose which drive to boot from. Logically you could install for example Windows 98 on a drive, then install Windows 2000 on a drive following by installing Windows XP and Vista on two additional drives. You could do this drive by drive with only the drive you are installing to connected. When you were done you would have four drives and each would have an operating system installed on it. At this point the BIOS will boot from whichever is the first boot drive set to boot from. So no gain there unless on each boot you enter the BIOS and change the boot order.

Now if you were going to do that it would be easier to just install an operating system to each drive and run a multi-boot system to my way of thinking.

Just My Take
Ron

 

[dknguyen]

It's called a hard drive tray is it not?

 

[Reloadron]

It's called a hard drive tray is it not?

If the BIOS allows booting from an external HDD then any form of external HDD could be used as long as the desired drive was placed in the drive at boot. However, you would be swapping hard drives in and out of the external enclosure. As to internal my hot swappable drive holds 6 drives in my workstation but it would be a pain in the butt to constantly swap drives around before boot just to boot into an OS of my choice. I think the point here is the ease with which it can be done. To my way of thinking that would be a simple multi-boot system which beats playing musical drives. Also the term "hard drive tray" is a little generic as to how we interpret it. I have seen the term used for a simple adapter to place a standard 3.5" HDD in a 5 1/4 inch bay.

Ron

 

[Gareth123]

Thanks for the replies. After posting my query I thought I would Google and I found a site which implies that by using a DPDT (Double Pole Change Over) switch to select the 5v & 12v power feeds to the individual Hds it is possible to switch select the HD required. I know that it means there would be a toggle switch sticking out of the PC front panel but that would not be a problem for me. Also it only allows for two HDs to be selected whereas I would like to be able to select one of three HDs.

 

[Reloadron]

You can give it a try, let us know how it works. If you can use a DPDT then you should be able to use a double pole rotary switch for 3 drives or more drives.

Ron

 

[arunb]

using a switch to turn ON/OFF hard disks ?? Won't that damage the disk ??

 

[Reloadron]

using a switch to turn ON/OFF hard disks ?? Won't that damage the disk ??

No it shouldn't if done right, though not a practice I am fond of. Actually you are choosing a disk before power is turned on anyway. However, once powered up then it would be unwise to switch HDDs using a power switch for the HDDs. What can be done is place a 2 pole rotary switch maybe in a panel blank of the front panel if you have an unused bay. Then choose a drive prior to powering on the system. You would go into the BIOS and set the BIOS to point to for example Disk 0 as a first boot drive, then Disk 1 then Disk 2 and whatever you have. When the system starts it will first look for Disk 0 but in the absence of Disk 0 it should go to Disk 1 and down the line in the order set in the BIOS.

Personally I just prefer setting up a multi boot system but that's just me.

Ron

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

Personally I just prefer setting up a multi boot system but that's just me.

Likewise, why would you want to try and do it any other way?.

 

[MrAl]

Hello,


If i understand this question right then all you want to do is switch which hard disk boots during your computer start up.

If that is right, then all you really have to do is go into your bios setup and change the boot order. Sometimes it is called "boot order" or sometimes "boot sequence" but this is a list of your devices like hard drives and CD rom drives and the like and you switch them around so that the first device to boot is at the top of the list. Once you switch, you reboot and the disk you selected as first is the one that tries to boot first. If you select a CD rom and there is no rom disk in the drive, it goes to the second device on the list and tries to boot from that one, etc.

Some of the other computers may not have this but they will have a means to turn off hard drives, which means you can turn off the ones you dont want to boot with. You may have to disable them in the hard disk setup screen, that's all.

When you go into bios setup however you have to be careful not to change anything that might be set for some other reason like memory settings and stuff like that. It might be a good idea to note what all the settings are before changing anything first. When you are done you just select "apply new changes" or something like that and next boot up the changes take effect.

You'll also have to find out how to get into your bios setup for your motherboard. This info would be found in the motherboard manul which can often be found online on the MoBo manufacturers web site. It is often "hit the del key when the computer starts to boot" but sometimes it is F8 instead, but it's best to check the manual.

Quick example:
http://en.kioskea.net/faq/648-boot-devices-modifying-boot-sequence

 

[Reloadron]

Hi Ya Nigel and MrAl. Well my take was the original poster chooses not to configure dual or actually multi boot from within the OS which was my first choice and also does not on each boot wish to enter the BIOS and change the boot devices. That sort of narrows the options available. So if we discount those options then we get to using a switch so only a single drive would be active at boot.

All of this has prompted me to take an old system the wife used at her work and reformat it and get it online. I will initially install XP Professional and get it updated to SP3. Once all of that is done I'll install Windows 7 on it. Windows 7 should run fine on it as it is very similar to one of my old systems I beta tested Windows 7 on and eventually installed Windows 7 on and we sent it to my wife's cousin in Arizona.

I still experiment every now and then with parallel port projects and the need for Windows XP. Newer systems lack XP and the parallel port is going the way of dinosaurs. Been wanting to get around to this for quite some time. Maybe even toss mt Linux Suse version on it.

Ron

 

[Gareth123]

Hi everybody

Again thanks for the replies.

I have in the meantime tried my setup with a c/o switch and it doesn't work. At least not by simply selecting the required HD at switch on. I have to go into the bios setup and use the HD auto config setup each time so that the system knows what drive is connected. I should say that I am using an old P2 with a 14Gb and a 2Gb HD. I installed win98 on one HD and NT4 on the other and provided I change the bios each time then the os will load and run. Otherwise it just hangs. It may work if both HD were the same size and manufacturer.
I know I should get with it and set up a dual boot system but I have tried a couple of times and got nowhere.

I also want to use the NT drive in a removable case and take it to a external PC which is actually running or connected to a test AirCon BMS system. That would allow me to do the programming/graphics away from the test and plug the HD in and go. As I said initially the Aircon system program runs on NT4 and requires a parellel port dongle (it will only work on NT4).

Gareth

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

I know I should get with it and set up a dual boot system but I have tried a couple of times and got nowhere.

Setting up a dual-boot system is trivial, far easier than arranging a switch

Many OS's offer a dual-boot option when you try and install it, if there's already an OS on the drive.

 

[Gareth123]

Hi Nigel

My two OS systems required are NT4 and XP. I believe I should load NT4 first and then XP. The Microsoft site says that I should load to two volumes, is that the same as partitioning the HD into two or should/can it be two HD's?

Gareth

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

As far as I can remember it's best as two partitions on the same drive, but it will do it for you anyway.

 

[Reloadron]

Hi Nigel

My two OS systems required are NT4 and XP. I believe I should load NT4 first and then XP. The Microsoft site says that I should load to two volumes, is that the same as partitioning the HD into two or should/can it be two HD's?

Gareth

Hi There, I wasn't too optimistic about the switch but setting up multiple-boot isn't really that bad. I assume you read this knowledge base article.
Before all else a Volume is a logical partition on the drive. If a drive has only a single partition, then that is the drive. The system looks at Disk as in Disk 0, Disk 1, Disk 2 etc. depending on the number of physical hard drives installed. A disk may have up to 4 bootable logical partitions. Regardless of disk size no more than 4 on a single disk. Those are volumes. You can have more than 4 volumes but only 4 that are bootable.

Generally speaking, especially with older operating systems like Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000 the best way to do it is to install oldest first and then work towards newest, installing each to its own volume. You can also have each volume be a separate hard drive (disk).

I saw where your hard drives are small but installing operating systems like Windows 98 and Windows NT don't require much space while newer operating systems like Vista and Windows 7 require space exceeding 12 GB. Also older systems, well actually prior to Vista use a boot loader called BOOT.INI which is easy to edit, starting with Vista Microsoft went to a boot loader called BCDEDIT.EXE a totally different animal.

If you choose to reformat and create partitions just remember oldest to newest and it should go fine. If you install '98 and then install NT the NT install will see the '98 install on its respective volume and edit its own BOOT.INI to include the '98 install. Or Windows 98 and then XP.

Ron

 

[Gareth123]

Good Day Nigel & Ron

I have printed out the knowledge base article and will have another go at setting up a dual boot.

Gareth

 

[Gareth123]

I have had another go at setting up a dual boot but not without many problems. The PC is an old P2 with 256M Ram and a 14GB HD.

I used FDISK to partition the HD with, I think, 2GB for NT4, the size was the default offered and was formatted as FAT. I installed NT4 first including SP6, so far so good. I checked that it worked ok.

I then loaded XP and was offered the remaining portion of the HD ±12 GB. Whilst it loaded OK it was extremely slow in doing so taking a couple of hours to load, XP SP 2 was even slower but I put this down the fact that I only had 256MB of ram. However it did load eventually and would run. The option was there to load XP or NT as desired but the whole process was very slow.

I then decided that I would take the HD out of this PC and put in another spare PC which was/is a P3 or P4 Celerion with 1GB of RAM. During the booting up I checked that the HD shown was correct and I was then given the choice of OS with XP in first place. This would run ok. Then I rebooted and selected NT----------Nothing.
So I thought what the heck I'll reload everything again but it should be be quicker this time as I was working on a faster PC. To cut a long story short it seems that this PC will not load NT. I tried with the OEM CD and also the OEM Floppies and the loading failed at the same spot, "loading the CD rom files" (shown at the bottom of the blue screen). I tried the process again with a 80GB HD and got the same result. I tried different BIOS options but no luck. I seem to remember that it was this PC that I was using when I first tried the dual boot a couple of years ago and eventually gave up. It just seems that this PC just will not load NT. I have just reloaded XP on the PC without any problems.
I have a spare mother board but it has SATA drives and I don't have any spare, perhaps I should go and buy a small one.

 

[Reloadron]

Real quick and off the top as I am at work. It is unwise to install an OS to a drive in one PC and then mopve the drive to another PC. The first reason is the motherboard drivers are all different. Your chipset drivers and everything common to the first PC is now gone. Windows XP will run on 256 MB of RAM but not very well depending on installed applications. Your frst installs were correct but the speed issues were likely caused bu low memory. XP came with a fairly good driver package but NT did not at all. I would venture a quick guess as that is why NT would not load from the drive on the second machine. Just a guess.

As to SATA I would make sure that SATA drivers are available for NT before doing anything else. For XP when the install first begins you will see a quick Press F6 to install third party drivers or something like that. This is where you would hit F6 and later will be prompted to install the SATA drivers. Those drivers will be for the SATA controller on the motherboard and are available at most motherboard manufacturers websites.

Ron

 

[SPDCHK]

Thanks for the replies. After posting my query I thought I would Google and I found a site which implies that by using a DPDT (Double Pole Change Over) switch to select the 5v & 12v power feeds to the individual Hds it is possible to switch select the HD required. I know that it means there would be a toggle switch sticking out of the PC front panel but that would not be a problem for me. Also it only allows for two HDs to be selected whereas I would like to be able to select one of three HDs.

Gareth, just a note on using a switch. On my previous PC (one that still had the HD's connected via IDE Ribbon cables) I simply switched the Master/Slave dip switch selection on the back of the HD via a change-over switch. Switched to one position the one HD would be the master and boot, else switching to the other position made the other HD the master. I had (might still have it) a foolproof method of loading multiple OS systems on one HD, where (at startup) you were offered the choice of which OS to start. (The good old days before XP and later OS releases). If I find time (and remember to) I'll search for the procedure.