SATA drives and dual booting

[Anyee]

SATA drives and dual booting

I have two SATA drives. Every time I boot my computer, the BIOS can't choose which to boot into and invariably makes my head hurt. Anyone know how I can make one drive secondary, ie not bootable? The old concept of slaving a drive (har) doesn't excist anymore.

 

[ffejrxx]

Re: SATA drives and dual booting

bios should have an option to change the boot order on the drives, with a list of model/serial numbers of each drive

or look up support on the mobo, it might need a bios update

 

[BobCox2]

Re: SATA drives and dual booting

Mind you I have XP on one drive and Vista on the other and change bios boot drive order settings to switch - very handy at times.

 

[ffejrxx]

Re: SATA drives and dual booting

some bios vers have an option on boot to pick the drive to boot from for that instance

or use a bootloader

 

[Dondrei]

Re: SATA drives and dual booting

That's a weird one, normally the BIOS assigns a priority, and if you don't like it you can change it.

Try swapping around the SATA cables maybe. Could be a weird harware issue.

 

[Anyee]

Re: SATA drives and dual booting

I wandered around in the BIOS a bit. It lets me set a generic boot order (CD ROM, Hard Drive, Floppy, etc.) but doesn't let me specify which drive to boot from.

I'll go check for an update to the Mobo. I generally like it and I'm wondering if it just needs to be smarter.

 

[Dondrei]

Re: SATA drives and dual booting

Hmm, what kind of motherboard is it? Do you know what BIOS it is?

Sounds pretty lousy, if it won't even let you select the drives.

 

[jmervyn]

Re: SATA drives and dual booting

I second the bootloader idea; Ubuntu Linux pre-configures and installs GRUB for you automatically.