adding drive letters to boot sequence

I have 2 hd's on my system.
one has win98 the other has win95B ( osr2 )
drive C has win98 drive D has win95B.
The only boot sequence is A then C, C then A, Or C only, or A only
Both hard drives are on IDE 0 and 1 Together master\slave.
Is there a way of adding drive D: to the boot sequence??
Don't want to have to swap cables, and reconfigure setup just to swap drives.

Thank you.

 

Install a boot manager on your C drive (BootMagic perhaps), this will give you a menu to select the O/S of your choice and *hide* the non selected. HTH.

 

I was wanting to boot from two different hard drives.
Not just two different O\S systems!!

Does boot magic do that??

 

luqa is correct...

You'll need to perform some chicanery to boot to any fixed drive other than your C: drive. Boot Magic does that for you. Other software is also available. You can use some freeware programs as well but you nearly have to be a computer egg head to do that. Then you could make your own menu system but that really gets to be stickey wicket. Been there/done it and although it worked it was more trouble than worth. Did it with Win31 and Win95 early on.

Post back if you want the freeware links and I'll be happy to supply.

 

Is there a free program that will let you choose between two
different drives??

not sure how long i will do this and just wanted to try it out for awhile.
would appreciate some links.

thanks Zephyr

 

Danger Will Robinson!

A couple years ago I played around with Ranish Partition Manager which is freeware. It work but takes lots of reading. I learned quite a bit in the process so it wasn't all a waste. I would recommend you have good backups just in case. Ranish can cause severe damage if you don't fully understand it. It has the ability to hide any system from all others and will let you set the the "Active status" on any partition or turnit off on all of them.

Don't let me scare you off but do be careful. I never lost anything using it but it scared hell out of me a couple times.

As I recall, the outcome was, Boot Magic software looked like more of a bargain after all.

 

I think you are right boot magic is not that high to buy.
I don't trust those programs that are still being developed.
I looked at some of them and it would take some study to learn them. Not that I don't have all kinds of freeware some are great!
I just don't like anything fooling around with the boot record.
I'm using osr2 right now and have access to the other drive,
in control panel, never wanted to dual boot anyway
when i get tired of playing with this one, I'll will just swap the cables back, takes about 5 minutes.
Since I won't be swapping very often everything will be ok.
I just added this Hd to have a backup for my personal files.
then decided to put osr2 on it just for fun.
not as though I didn't have other means of backup, three computer network, CD writer.
Makes it handy if you want to reformat or something.
You can just shuffel things to the other drive until you are finished.

THanks for the info Zephyr

 

Good decision I would say.

I do approve of your backup method since I use the same one. I use the XXCOPY utility for cloning the C: to the D: and when needed, I can change the drive jumpers and boot the backup. The XXCOPY command will overwrite the backup incrementally each time I execute it and normally only takes 3 minutes to complete, so I run it each morning when boot up is successful. Did I mention it's FREEWARE.


Best regards

 

Zephyr--nice to hear I'm not the only one who felt uneasy about using Ranish

Tin

 

Thanks Zephyr:
You too Tinknocker:
I think my question has pretty well been answered.
Think i'll just enjoy using the two drives for awhile.
At least until I get a wild hair and go off on another
Goose chase.
Most of the time I can't leave well enough alone.
Need to know what makes things tick!!

 

XXCopy sounds like a neat little utility.

I use Norton Ghost 2001 and it works great. It clones my whole hard drive (including boot sector) in about 5 minutes - less if I just want to ghost my primary partition.

A note about the XOSL boot manager. I use it and it comes with Ranish but I don't use the Ranish Partition Manager. XOSL is a great little (freeware) boot manager but be forewarned it does not uninstall correctly! I just recently lost over 30,000 files when I uninstalled it - it left my partition table hosed! I probably wouldn't have been so confident uninstalling it but it uninstalled correctly at a previous time.

I still use XOSL and seem to have a working uninstall procedure:
1. I disconnect the slave drive which, alone, boots just fine as a master. I don't think XOSL screws with the slave's boot sector.
2. I then run the uninstall on the Master drive to restore its original boot sector.

I did the above and both drives were bootable afterwards. But mind you I will never again try to uninstall XOSL without backing up all files first!!!

 

Under control there.

chiles4 it sounds like you have a handle on it there. If the Ghost is serving you, then stick with a winner. If you ever need XXCOPY, Google will easily turn it up and if you have a moment sometimes, there is a Yahoo discussion group hosted by the creator of XXCOPY that you can find by Google searching XXCOPY GROUP. Some good info there about many topics and some smart people to ask, kinda like WindowsBB here.

I especially appreciate XXCOPY since I can run it from a batch file (xxcopy /clone c:\ d:\) and away we go. One word of caution, with that command, it takes over the entire D: drive so you better not have anything in the way or it automatically hoses it. Another of my hard knock lessons. XXCOPY /clone c:\ d:\myBackups is the command when you want to share the drive with other files and not lose them. Of course the drive won't have a "bootable" clone then but there are ways around that too.

I didn't mean to slate Mikhail Ranish, the man is a pure genius and his program is extremely powerful. It's just that us mere mortals need better interface and protection so we don't hurt ourselves. If he ever gets hooked up with someone who can harness his program safely, it's bound to be a real winner.

ciao