I am sure I used to be able to hardware dual boot my PC but I don't seem able to any more.
By hardware dual boot I mean I have a removable drive caddy in which I have a 40Gb ATA drive set as master, fixed in my system I have a 160GB drive set as slave. In principle (and this used to work I thought) when I unlock my removable (essentially cutting its power), for the cost of a slight delay, the system will boot off the slave ... that definitely works. When I relock the drive (restoring power) the system will power up and boot off the master ... that works too but there's a problem.
My problem seems to reside in the BIOS (which is why I wonder if some kind of standard Award BIOS “upgrade” is responsible) where I can (must) set the order of booting. So I set it to my standard Floppy --> CD --> Hard Disk and then set the boot order to my removable master (Seagate) followed by my fixed slave (Maxtor) and that's fine too. If I then unlock my master drive and boot from the slave the BIOS loses the Seagate Removable and when it puts it back (next time I lock the removable in place) the removable is second in boot order where I don't want it.
In other words yes it works but I have to revisit the BIOS each time I want to use the removable drive as my boot disk.
I know I could use a software boot loader solution but I am really not keen on those mainly because I use my removable disk as a test system and I REALLY don't want those mucking about with my stable system or the partition of the drive it is on i.e. the reason I opt for hardware boot is as a means of protecting my stable system from the ravages of OS installations.
Any ideas would be helpful.
By hardware dual boot I mean I have a removable drive caddy in which I have a 40Gb ATA drive set as master, fixed in my system I have a 160GB drive set as slave. In principle (and this used to work I thought) when I unlock my removable (essentially cutting its power), for the cost of a slight delay, the system will boot off the slave ... that definitely works. When I relock the drive (restoring power) the system will power up and boot off the master ... that works too but there's a problem.
My problem seems to reside in the BIOS (which is why I wonder if some kind of standard Award BIOS “upgrade” is responsible) where I can (must) set the order of booting. So I set it to my standard Floppy --> CD --> Hard Disk and then set the boot order to my removable master (Seagate) followed by my fixed slave (Maxtor) and that's fine too. If I then unlock my master drive and boot from the slave the BIOS loses the Seagate Removable and when it puts it back (next time I lock the removable in place) the removable is second in boot order where I don't want it.
In other words yes it works but I have to revisit the BIOS each time I want to use the removable drive as my boot disk.
I know I could use a software boot loader solution but I am really not keen on those mainly because I use my removable disk as a test system and I REALLY don't want those mucking about with my stable system or the partition of the drive it is on i.e. the reason I opt for hardware boot is as a means of protecting my stable system from the ravages of OS installations.
Any ideas would be helpful.
