Adding second drive makes boot drive1???!!!???

[jake59]

This is the strangest problem that is screwing me up on this machine.

It is a dual core intel box with 1gb mem. I have an ide boot drive that is multi boot partitioned.

When a second drive is added, the second drive becomes drive0 and the boot drive become drive1.

This screws up bootmagic for multiboot.

The bios has the boot drive correct as drive0, but when in XP the boot drive becomes drive1 and the newly added second drive as drive0.

Partition magic also has the boot drive as drive1.

Any ideas anyone?????

Thanks,

Jake

 

[G0AOZ]

Is this second drive an IDE or a SATA perhaps?

If both drives are IDE and on the same cable, check that original drive is jumpered as Master, and the new drive as a Slave. Also make sure the Master is at the end of the cable and not the "middle" connector. (This last item is more important if using Cable Select).

Does BIOS show boot configuration? Make sure the original drive is shown as the 1st to boot.

ROGER - G0AOZ.

 

[jake59]

I should have mentioned the drives have the correct jumpers. No they are not on the same cable. Yes the bios is setup correctly.

 

[wolluf]

But as roger asked - is second drive IDE or SATA?

If they're both IDE - how many IDE connectors do you have, and what are your optical drive(s) connected via? Have you tried swapping the IDE connectors?

If second is SATA - does the mobo have setting to allow SATA drives to be seen as IDE (most recent ones do)? If so, set it - then SATA drives should follow IDE drives.

 

[jake59]

Second drive is sata and IDE, I have tried both drive types. Same thing with any drive I try to add. No the bios/mb does not translate from sata to ide. Does same thing whether CD/DVD is hooked up or not.

 

[jake59]

I called Western digital tech support. Overseas asian I could hardly hear. After he had me check my settings with him and spending several minutes consultinf with someone else he came back on the phone and said it was a windows issue.

Now I know that western digital is lax on thier jumper settings compaired to maxtor, etc. Western digital it turns out is going more along with windows in that it doesn't make any difference what drive you boot from. Problem is any multi boot software and dos do care. But apparantly they don't count.

As usual microsoft info on this problem is hard to come by. One article suggested a reformat with fdisk to select drive 0. That would take forever with my loaded hd.

I managed to do something I don't like to do because of transfer rates, etc. I made the original wd1200 the primary master and a wd1600 as primary slave.

Now the wd1200 boots as disk0 and other boots as disk 1.

 

[G0AOZ]

I have never used Bootmagic so cannot comment on how it works, but adding another drive to the system must surely mean you need to adjust its settings.

So they're both IDEs... Sounds to me like something is wrong somewhere, possible within the BIOS, as having a drive show up there as the FIRST drive, should automatically make it show in Windows Disk Management as the FIRST drive. As far as the BIOS is concerned, it dosn't necessarily mean the FIRST drive is the one the system is going to boot from - depends HOW the BIOS boot sequence is set. Sometimes BIOSs show drives as 1 and 2, when Windows Disk Management show those same drives as 0 and 1. In fact I think my boot manager (MRBOOTER) shows the drives as 1 and 2, which can be mighty confusing if you're not careful!

ROGER - G0AOZ.

 

[jake59]

Please do everyone a favor before you post. Read the previous posts.

If you have not used a boot manager other than built into a bios or windows, and a drive with DOS boot partition then you do not get the problem.

DOS boot partitions have to be on disk0.

Hard drives do have settings but if you have an IDE drive as master and add an sata via a different connector on the MB you do not have to change IDE settings. You only change IDE settings/jumpers if adding another IDE drive if on the same cable. If you have a HD jumpered as master on primary master and add a HD to secondary master you do not have to change primary master jumper settings.

As stated above the bios reports the drives correctly. It is windows that arbitrarly assigns drives incorrectly.

I said I tried an sata and an ide drive. I have both to play with. To solve the problem I used an ide and installed as primary slave.

Just for giggles I then hooked up the sata and it became disk0 with the boot becoming disk1 and the addon ide being disk2.

The problem still exists if I add an sata drive. I did not try adding an ide drive on secondary master with pri master and slave working.

The problem is windows assigns drives in a strange way because it doesn't matter to windows where it boots from. It is not backward compatible with dos boot partitions.

There is one thing I did not try and that is fdisking the drive and starting over with new formats. That may make a difference. It could be that fdisk assigns some bit somewhere in the drive that tells it what disk it is.

In other words, let us say you have a drive that has been a logical drive in another computer and you want to make it a boot drive in another computer. If you install it and format it without fdisk it may think it is still something other than disk0 if there is another drive in the system.

 

[BadBigBen]

I managed to do something I don't like to do because of transfer rates, etc. I made the original wd1200 the primary master and a wd1600 as primary slave.

1. what does that have to do with transferrates? and 2. any added drive should be hooked as Slave to the BOOT drive on the same IDE cable...

The problem still exists if I add an sata drive.

of course, SATA has a higher priority then IDE, on most motherboards, it gets mapped into the device lists before IDE, and it is this CMOS list that Windows uses...

Ben

"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."

 

[jake59]

Company tech support always wanted people to put additional hard drives and cd/dvd drives on seperate cables because of increased transfer rates and less crosstalk.

It used to be their staple answer in helping to avoid problems with cd/dvd recording on the same cable as a source hard drive.

They would say the slowest device on a cable lowered the speed of the faster device. ie a ata133 dma5 hd with a slower pio cd drive or a dma4 hd.

That may not be true today, but it is what they use to say.

If you have a hd on a cable by itself, some drives do not require a jumper at all. But if you add a slave drive you may have to jumper both drives. The master as master with slave and the slave as a slave.

Ok, but my point was if I add another drive, even an ide, the boot drive is no longer disk0. It becomes disk1 and the slave becomes disk2.

Another interesting observation. A person would think that a boot manager, even if installed in windows, would be the first thing in the boot sequence since the bios has already detected the drivves. Not so, becuase it would not work if the drive had a dos partition. Apparently windows loads some devices first.

I have about 8 computers and notebooks here at home and I have never run into this until windows 2k & xp for obvious reasons. But since I still have old dos programming customers I have to have the dos boot partition. Didn't notice the conflict before because dos boot partition was on a one drive notebook.

 

[BadBigBen]

That may not be true today, but it is what they use to say.

Yep, it's not true today anymore... it used to be true for PIO modes of transfer but not for DMA...

yes, DOS (FAT16 and FAT32) needs to be on the first PRIMARY and ACTIVE drive and then on the first PARTITION under the 1024mb threshold... if I remember correctly...

The problem is that the DRIVE you are adding, is mostlikely SET as ACTIVE and thus Windows will take it as DRIVE0... You would need to DEACTIVATE this by using FDISK or similar program, and DELETE all partitions (Leave it RAW), then reboot into Windows XP, and use the Drive Management Utility to FORMAT and Partition the drive...

Ben

"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."

 

[jake59]

Nope, every drive I tried to add as additional storage was setup as a logical drive.

But even if the drive was an ide and set to active and was a boot drive in another machine it should not take precedence over a boot drive on the primary master unless the bios is set for it.

The only conclusion I can come to by the evidence is windows looks at the first partition on a drive and decides what to do from there. If it encounters a dos partition it goes to the first partition that will support windows, even if it doesn't have windows installed, then make it disk0. But then what is wierd is it will run from the windows active boot partition from the drive it made disk1. The stupid logic is astounding.

What the programmers should have done is say this drive is bios disk0 so it must have something I can run on. looking at active partions on the drive. If not I will go to disk1, etc.

In short, instead of looking at the first partition it should look at the first active partition.


No wonder windows has so many thousands of bugs. Maybe that is what you get with all those alien visas.

 

[BadBigBen]

I can't concur with you that Windows is the blame on this...

reason: On my work machine I have two drives, one is SATA and the other is IDE, WinXP is on the IDE, Vista and Linux are on the SATA, obviously both drives are active, but what ever I change in the BIOS, e.g. IDE as start drive(DRIVE0) it will boot from the IDE and sees the SATA as DRIVE1 and vice versa...

synopsis: this may well be a compounded problem, where the BIOS and Windows in conjunction is at fault...

Remedy: since you detest Windows, taken from your statements, why not install Linux, OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, or get a MAC...

Ben

"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."

 

[jake59]

again, you might not be getting the problem.

If the bios has the disk ids right and windows changes the disk ids, which do you think is causing the problem?

One last time, when the machine boots the bios reports the disk ids correctly. Windows apparntly boots before the boot manager and switches the disk ids causing the boot manager to not work because the disk id is nolonger 0.

 

[jake59]

After rereading your last post I think you are not using a comparable example. You are using the bios as a boot manager where I am using 3rd party software.

A person can only assume windows switches the disk ids because of the dos partition being the first partition on the disk. If windows looked for the first windows active partition (next partition after dos)it would not need to switch ids with a non boot disk.

 

[vacunita]

I have to chime in here.

You say Windows decides to go and change the boot drives?

Where is it magically running from when it does his?

Windows boots from a drive because that's where it or at the very least its boot files reside.

Windows cannot just ethereally be active and choose what drive to boot from before it actually boots. That just not how these things work.

The Bios has a set sequence of boot devices, and looks for a bootable one to start the machine. Whatever order it has in its boot sequence is the order it follows.

So for instance if ts set to boot from CD first then floppy and then HD0 then that's the order its going to looks for boot files.

If it finds anything it thinks the machine can be booted from before reaching the hard drive it will prompt the boot sequence of that device.


Now if its set to boot from HD1 first then HD0 and then CD or something, it could conceivably skip HD1 when one is not present and go on and boot from HD0, but when hd1 is present it tries to boot from it. At this time its all BIOS, neither windows nor your boot manager have even begun to be in the picture.

Once the BIOS finds something it determines can be booted from, then it lets it do its thing. That's when your Boot manager or Widows will start to boot.

So I know this may sound redundant after all that's been said, but check your boot sequence.


----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[roo0047]

After reading all of this back and forth, I see no mention of the one determining factor:

The contents of file boot.ini on the primary drive. A totally configurable flat text file that tells windows not only what drive to boot from (key: [boot loader]), but also what OS to load (key: [operating systems]).

I swap drives (both sata and ide) all the time and that's what matters to windows. It does what you tell it to. boot.ini is where you tell it.

In fact, I have one drive with 3 partitions: Server 2003, W2K and W98SE. I can boot from all 3. The only exception is; to boot to W98, I MUST run FDisk to select it (via ACTIVE Partition). And again to switch back to either of the other two.

The ONLY requirement in the bios settings is to make the drives visible to the OS.

HTH

 

[jake59]

My last post here guys.

There is a big difference between booting from a bios and a boot manager. In a bios you are chosing a drive where in software you are chosing a partition. And that software changes the statis of the active partition.

In other words if I boot into windows xp on partiotion 2 it is active. If I reboot and choose the DOS boot the boot manager changes the active partition to partition 1 then proceeds with the dos boot.

But that doesn't work if the drive is no longer disk0.

Here is the disk0 boot.ini

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

DOS partition is 1, windows xp pro is 2 and w2k is 3. Then 2 extended partitions for data.

As you can see the disk0 partition 2 is windows xp boot that is active. That seems to make no difference to windows. With a sata on its own mb connector or ide drive on secondary cable the bios come up correctly. When windows boots up and I go into disk management the orginal disk0 is now disk1 and any other drive is disk0 unless it is configured as the primary slave behind the primary master.

Every hd in this thing has been swaped out for testing and even the dive cables. Called wd tech support and they said it was windows. I am using partition magic and bootmanager 8 and have for years.

I have worked on computers since 1981. The hard drives were MFM then.

This is not an electronic component glitch. It is steady and happens every time.

I have not had this problem before. But there is one difference I just thought of and that is I am now on xp sp3. I ignored the problem for a while because I didn't need to boot to dos so I do not know if it is related.

Now that I have a second drive on primary slave as disk1 the disk0 boot drive comes up as Disk0 in windows every time. But if I add a sata drive it will come up as disk0, then the boot drive as disk1 and the second ide as disk2.

Even though only the DVD (secondary slave)then disk0 (primary master)is in the bios as bootable devices. Also, when the drive is added and it kicks disk0 to disk1 it still boots to from windows on partition 2 of disk1 without selecting it in software.

 

[PRPhx]

It could be that 1) You will need to reload the OS, and press the F6 key and load the SATA driver for the SATA drive. It's a suggestion.

2) It COULD be the boot manager is causing the problem. Why are you using it anyways, when windows works just fine. I've used bootmanager is the past and found it nothing but a pain in the ass. Never again.

I would reformat my drives. Then load DOS, then load any OS, from the oldest to the newest.

And I've been working on computers since '79-80. Drives technology also included RLL.

 

[BadBigBen]

Just for informational purposes:

BOOT.INI and ARC Path Naming Conventions and Usage

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/102873

Understanding the Boot.ini naming convention

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pr...serv/reskit/prork/prbd_std_ccef.mspx?mfr=true

Ben

"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."