PC Peripherals ULTIMATE HARD DISK SETTINGS - brain racking question

Status
Not open for further replies.
S

sunandoghosh

Contributor
ULTIMATE HARD DISK SETTINGS - brain racking question

Respected Tech gurus and dear forum members

Here goes the situation:

I have one INTEL 865 GBF motherboard

As far as I have understood (and correct me if i am wrong) i can attach six devices (be it Hard disk or optical drive).

Two sata hard disks can be attached to two sata interfaces and
Two pata hard disks cab be attached to EACH ide interfaces

Thus all in all 6 hard disks (or say 5 hard disks and one CD rom can be attached) on my intel 865 GBF motherboard.

Now furthermore i also understand that for SATA hard disks there is no problem of master / slave.

But for each pata HDD attached to either IDE channel, we can have

primary master
primary slave
secondary master
secondary slave

NOW MY QUESTION IS THAT :

Say I am having two SATA hard disks

SATA Hard Disk One with windows advanced server 2000 OS (80GB)
SATA Hard Disk Two with windows XP professional (160GB)

ALso I am having three PATA hard disks

PATA Hard Disk One with windows advanced server 2000 OS (80GB)
PATA Hard Disk Two with windows XP professional (80GB)
PATA Hard Disk Three with windows XP professional (160GB)

In addition last but not the least one CD-ROM drive

BIG QUESTION:

WHAT SHOULD BE MY SETTINGS (which pata hard disk should be connected to which ide channel and whether as master or slave) SO THAT I AM ABLE TO BOOT FROM ANY HARD DISK (i get a choice when i power on my computer to select hard disk i want to be in) AND AFTER BOOTING FROM A PARTICULAR HARD DISK BE ABLE TO ACCESS DATA OF ALL REMAINING HARD DISKS SIMULTANEOUSLY...??????????????????????????????

Please reply in detail specifying which hard disk (for pata) should be master / slave on what channel and reasons if possible...????

Regards

Sunando
 
I have run upto 4 HDDs 2xPATA and 2xSATA each with its own operating system and it DOES NOT matter which drives is attached as Master or Slave (all SATA drives are Masters) just make the drive you want to boot from as the first boot device in the BIOS.

This will only work if like me you install each drives OS when that drive is the only one attached to the computer. After I do this and I want to start a particular OS from any one of the HDD I make it the first boot device in the BIOS. I have done this for years without any problems.
 
"This will only work if like me you install each drives OS when that drive is the only one attached to the computer."
Click to expand...

Just clarifying what u said...what u r trying to say is that only one Hard Disk should be connected to motherboard and then we should install OS on that device...this way we should do OS installation for each hard disk individually (making sure others are not connected). Then it will not matter which is connected to what.

"After I do this and I want to start a particular OS from any one of the HDD I make it the first boot device in the BIOS. "
Click to expand...

I hope that here what u r trying to say is that after installing OS in each Hard disk on a stand alone mode as indicated above...now we can have all four Hard Disk connected simultaneously to motherboard and depending on our choice in BIOS we can boot in any one and also access data of rest. The arrangement of master slave u say is immaterial now.

Please confirm whether i have understood u clearly.

Also anyone willing to add anything to the whole discussion.
 
sunandoghosh said:
I hope that here what u r trying to say is that after installing OS in each Hard disk on a stand alone mode as indicated above...now we can have all four Hard Disk connected simultaneously to motherboard and depending on our choice in BIOS we can boot in any one and also access data of rest. The arrangement of master slave u say is immaterial now.

Please confirm whether i have understood u clearly.

Also anyone willing to add anything to the whole discussion.
Click to expand...

EXACTLY !! You have got it right.

When I installed XP on one HDD and then made it the slave to a new drive and installed XP to the fresh new drive XP found that another OS was on the system and it made some links between the 2 installations and gave me a lot of headaches. But when it is installed on a HDD which is the only one connected and finally all the HDD are connected up - there are no problems. I have done this since I had a pair of 125MB (yes MB not GB) drives with Windows v.3.0 This maeans that all installed OS see themselves installed on a C drive.

I have never used a boot manager on my system - this would install one OS to run from a C drive and another from a D and so on. In such setups I feel that if the C drive gets corrupted or is removed than the full chain breaks down as all the drive allocations go haywire. Maybe someone else here can comment on this.

The way I work I can start XP if one drive is alone or is combined with any other number of drives.

At this moment I have 8 HDDs and I play musical chairs with them - I now run 2 drives in the main case and 2 in USB external cases - and I move drives around depending on my mood.
 
"In such setups I feel that if the C drive gets corrupted or is removed than the full chain breaks down as all the drive allocations go haywire. Maybe someone else here can comment on this. "
Click to expand...

Lets see if some super geek says something...................................???
"The way I work I can start XP if one drive is alone or is combined with any other number of drives."
Click to expand...

Great and i assume also that when all HDDs are connected you can access data of other Hard Disks from the Hard Disk from which u have booted...which essentailly means all HDDs are simultaneously connected and u can see all
HDDs in computer management - disk management.

Also swapping places of HDDs on IDE channel makes no difference and we should be least concerned which hard disk is on which channel / ide (primary/secondary) and which status (master / slave).

Thus we can plug and play with HDDs..?????????
 
Eazy said:
In such setups I feel that if the C drive gets corrupted or is removed than the full chain breaks down as all the drive allocations go haywire. Maybe someone else here can comment on this.
Click to expand...

What happens in such situations is that your boot files (like MSDOS.SYS, IO.SYS etc) get stored on C drive for ALL OS installations. These boot files are not installed on the individual drives, so without drive C - there would be no boot files and they would not run at all.

Control is passed on to each OS with the help of the "boot.ini" file again stored on C drive which gives you the OS options on boot-up and accordingly allows you to access the relevant OS on the relevant drive.
 
Just clarifying my dear friend that i have been able to understand u correctly....

"What happens in such situations is that your boot files (like MSDOS.SYS, IO.SYS etc) get stored on C drive for ALL OS installations. These boot files are not installed on the individual drives, so without drive C - there would be no boot files and they would not run at all."
Click to expand...

When u say " These boot files are not installed on the individual drives"
u mean to say that its only first hard disk (drive here refers to hard disk i believe) and again partition C only on it....which has boot files (like MSDOS.SYS, IO.SYS etc) stored and which will help partition D on this first hard disk and all other hard disks 2,3,4 to boot up.

It means that such boot files (like MSDOS.SYS, IO.SYS etc) are not stored in Partition D of hard disk one and all other hard disks.

This would mean that hard disk 2, 3, 4 etc would on a complete standalone basis would not be able to boot up...???????????
(as boot files are missing)...

this would mean that i need to have hard disk 1 always connected when i want to boot up any other hard disk...???????

please confirmmmmmmmmmmmmmm???????? :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap:
 
sunandoghosh said:
Just clarifying my dear friend that i have been able to understand u correctly....

When u say " These boot files are not installed on the individual drives"
u mean to say that its only first hard disk (drive here refers to hard disk i believe) and again partition C only on it....which has boot files (like MSDOS.SYS, IO.SYS etc) stored and which will help partition D on this first hard disk and all other hard disks 2,3,4 to boot up.

It means that such boot files (like MSDOS.SYS, IO.SYS etc) are not stored in Partition D of hard disk one and all other hard disks.

This would mean that hard disk 2, 3, 4 etc would on a complete standalone basis would not be able to boot up...???????????
(as boot files are missing)...

this would mean that i need to have hard disk 1 always connected when i want to boot up any other hard disk...???????

please confirmmmmmmmmmmmmmm???????? :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap:
Click to expand...

Hmm, you would need that individual Hard disk to boot to that particular OS.

Coz the boot files for each OS are in the C Partition of each HDD..

If you use HDD 1 as master always and intall other OS in individual drives then u would need HDD1 as master to boot up to em in that scenario..
 
Well, the boot files always go on C: drive. But, if you have only the one hdd connected while installing, all files will be on the same drive. Then when you select which hdd to boot from thru bios, this hdd will become C: drive.

So, all your HDDs can work on stanalone basis.

I've done this on my office PC. Have Win Xp on two disks, can boot from either. The boot disk becomes C:, D:, E: etc, and the non-boot disk follows as F:, G: etc. So, it is VERY important to give proper labels to the partitions, so as to understand which HDD they're on.
 
zhopudey said:
The boot disk becomes C:, D:, E: etc, and the non-boot disk follows as F:, G: etc. So, it is VERY important to give proper labels to the partitions, so as to understand which HDD they're on.
Click to expand...

I find it easier to differeniate between the HDDs when I have the drive letters allocated in bunches - I do this from Disk Management - I have 3 partitions on each drive - like so .....

drive 1 is CDE
drive 2 is GHI
drive 3 is LMN
drive 4 is RST
Opticlas are VW

If I boot from say drive 2 its partitions becomes CDE and then the drive 1 partitions are named GHI.

I had it the way you do it but it got really confusing which partition was for which drive..... Once in all the confusion I actually mirrored a blank partition over the one with the data :(
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom