Dual Boot question...

[Asazman]

Here's the thing: I have a Promise IDE RAID card that has 2x Maxtor 200GB 8MB hard drives at RAID0 (has my main OS WinXP), and a Western Digital SATA hard drive (corrupted OS, still has files) that is by itself on the motherboard. Now, the OS on the WD is corrupt and will not boot past the Windows XP screen.

Now, I have the Abit NF7-S motherboard. I want to boot off my Promise card/hard drives, so I put the first boot device as "SCSI" in the BIOS. This boots into the SATA (despite the fact that there is a separate entry for SATA). I want to boot into my Promise hard drives. It boots into it fine when the SATA is not attached.

Help? Thanks!

 

[axdx]

If it's an IDE controller card, why are you setting first boot device to SCSI?
Have you tried setting IDE to boot before SATA?

 

[Ice Czar]

Originally posted by axdx
If it's an IDE controller card, why are you setting first boot device to SCSI?

IDE RAID arrays, and any IDE Controller card employ SCSI drivers
for all intensive purposes, the OS thinks its a SCSI device\array


regarding the original question....Im thinking

EDIT > OK possible solutions,
fix the corrupted OS and edit the boot.ini
or
move the PCI RAID card up in the PIRQ order higher than the SATA
for that youd either trial and error or find the Routing table?
PIRQ Overview

Damn Spaceballs is the Afternoon movie

 

[axdx]

Originally posted by Ice Czar
IDE RAID arrays, and any IDE Controller card employ SCSI drivers
for all intensive purposes, the OS thinks its a SCSI device\array

Didn't know that.

I just remembered that Windows will only boot from the first hard drive, according to microsoft documentation & common sense. So, the active partition of whatever drive/controller is listed in BIOS first - wins.

I remember when I was setting up an old server with Windows 2000 Server, I had to de-activate the IDE disks in BIOS in order to get the server to boot from the SCSI. Deactivating them in BIOS didn't stop the OS from seeing and using the drives normally though...

Back to original question, you can boot you corrupted OS (SATA) to recovery console, then run detection for installed operating systems (the command is available in XP console but not 2000, and will also update your boot.ini according to discovered configurations.). You will then have a dual-boot system, afterwards you only need to remove the corrupted XP entry from boot.ini to always boot to the working one.

or

edit boot.ini manually by writing something like:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Corrupted" /fastdetect
---
and copy it to the corrupted installation root using a floppy disk and Recovery Console