Quake3World

I just bought 2 80 gig sata drives and have them as raid 1.
I have a second IDE hard drive that I want to put my game files on.
Also I want to make the sata drives have a dual boot.

The problem is that it will dual boot if I don't have the IDE HD connected. Is there a way around this?

Which two operating systems?

If they're the same, just edit your boot.ini manually and point it to the location where the 2nd OS is installed.

The boot.ini file is fine. It's when the IDE HD is connected that it dosen't want to dual boot.

What do you mean it's fine?

Will it boot normally with just a single OS installed, with the IDE drive connected?

FragaGeddon wrote:I just bought 2 80 gig sata drives and have them as raid 1.
I have a second IDE hard drive that I want to put my game files on.
Also I want to make the sata drives have a dual boot.

The problem is that it will dual boot if I don't have the IDE HD connected. Is there a way around this?

Your language is confusing and contradictory.

RAID 1 is mirror disks, so your 'second' SATA would be for the most part completely transparent to you system.

If you BIOS is properly configured to boot off of the SATA drives in the RAID 1 config, then all you need is Windows (assuming it's running off the RAID) to acknowledge the second OS on the IDE drive. This can be done by modifying your boot.ini file. Google for a million tutorials on how to setup a dual boot config this way.

R00k wrote:What do you mean it's fine?

Will it boot normally with just a single OS installed, with the IDE drive connected?

It will dual boot if the IDE HD is NOT connected.
When I connect the IDE HD then it just simply loads up the first install of the OS.

There isn't another boot.ini/ntldr/ntdetect/etc. on the IDE drive, from a previous install or anything, is there?

If not, I'd check for cmos settings if you haven't, and look for any known problems with the firmware version of your controller.

There's no boot file on the IDE HD. Just wondering if I need an IDE raid controller card to make this work properly.

No, you shouldn't need another IDE controller.

Ive got a similar problem.
My main XP drive is an 80Gb SATA
My personal drive is a 160Gb SATA

My PC will not fucking boot up windows unless the 160 is unplugged or my XP cd is in the DVD drive for it to try to boot from first, give up, THEN decide to boot from the HD.

Ive tried new & hacked BIOS updates for my M/board but no luck.

Hope im making sense of this too :icon27:

Well what I think I might do is install one OS on the sata drives and the other on the IDE drive for gaming.
The install my games on the sata drive.
And I'll probably put my mp3's on the IDE drive.
Hopefully that will work.

complimentary e-penis screenshot

PS: have you configured your boot priority correctly? eg: scsi/sata raid 1st, then the rest... hell, even remove completely the IDE HD from the boot listing.

Turbanator wrote:PS: have you configured your boot priority correctly? eg: scsi/sata raid 1st, then the rest... hell, even remove completely the IDE HD from the boot listing.

Thanks Turb, that worked. Didn't even think about setting the boot to SCSI. :icon14:

What? :icon27:

to RAID, he means

No, I know what he means. Most BIOSes have to be set to 'SCSI' to boot to the SATA controller.

It was just so obvious I thought he would have already checked it.

"Oh fuck, you mean I'm supposed to TELL it to boot to my hard drive?!"

Sorry Frag, I don't mean any offense or anything. I guess I just consider it second nature after all the times I've had to do it.

Well the computer would dual boot without the IDE HD connected.
Just couldn't figure out why it wouldn't dual boot when it was connected.
All I had in the boot setup was floppy and cd-rom.