Do u believe this... Slave booting as master

[Xaqte]

Ok, I thought I would post this because I never thought that this could physically happen (if configured correctly) and wanted to know if anyone else has had a similar occurence. I run a disk backup program nightly that copies my master drive to the slave drive. My normal backup/rotation routine:
1. Shelve the master
2. Promote the slave to master (change pin configurations)
3. Pull oldest master drive off shelf and demote to slave
4. Connect both drives and boot up off of last nights drive

This morning, after completing the above process (as I've done a number of times over the years) and turned on the pc. After logging in and careful inspection of the data, I noticed that the drive I was operating on had old data... it booted the slave drive as master (completing overlooking the master). In "My Computer" it showed the slave as the C: drive & didn't show the other drive.

After replacing the HD cable, everything acted as normal.
The specs:
Windows 2000 server
and all HD are WD 80gig (same model)

Go figure!

 

[BadBigBen]

This has something todo with the ACTIVE partition, I believe, if you set the Partition to Active on the MasterDrive then it should boot from the Master...



Ben

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

 

[EdwardAtSGI]

For all they taught me at the university, we still haven't gotten to the class that explains why stuff like that can still happen.

Looking at it mathematically, one must ask which is more probable:

1. A series of highly unlikely errors combined in an even more unlikely way to cause a seemingly impossible result.

Or...

2. My professors are lying about how the computer works because they don't want to admit that it's really all just magic.

I think the mathematical answer is clear.

 

[bcastner]

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q825668

 

[jrbarnett]

This isn't confined to only newer systems. Several years ago I witnessed a K6-300 system with Win98 boot from a hard drive set as slave on the secondary IDE channel (only HDD in the PC); the only device on the master channel was the cd-rom drive.

Despite this, the machine worked fine.

John

 

[garebo]

I have seen that a few times in posts here where the computer is booting from the secondary channel.
As someone already mentioned, if the hard drive is set as active, it will often boot from either channel.

Good advice + great people = tek-tips

 

[Gloryhound]

In my experience if the master drive does not have an active partition and the slave does it would boot to the slave drive. Bootable drives have never actually had the requirement of being the master drive in my recollection. It's always just worked that way with all the systems I've seen in the last 12 years. However that doesn't translate to RAID at all.

 

[garebo]

I believe you are right. It doesnt really matter where the drive is located on an ide 33 cable as the system will look for the first active drive and go for that one. If there is no system on it, thats it. With an ultra 66\100\133 cable the active drive has to be on the black, end cable, and it must be set to master or no go. But the active hard drive could still be on the secondary channel.

I imagine its still a better idea to have the master\primary as the active bootable drive with the os on it. I dont use ghost so i dont know if that would make a difference to that program, if it needed the active drive to be master\primary. There might be other programs that might demand the os be on the primary ide channel.




Good advice + great people = tek-tips