Dirty Harry

RAID... who talked about RAID? Have you tasted that bug killer ? This has nothing to do with RAID, and in fact I would recommend using a boot manager instead if you want to dual boot on a RAID setup. And BTW, there was nothing wrong with your original post, I just pointed out an alternative for some.

An easy (easier) way to dual boot if you have a MB with two controllers (or external controller) and two separate harddrives is to use the bios as the boot manager. I use the Abit KA7-100 and just clone my standard boot partition (C :)on the "Future ATA" to the other HD (D on the HDD-0 controller. Then I just select in bios where I want to boot from. The great thing is that with W2K all the other drive assigment letters stay put, so all programs work. If you use Drive Image or Ghost it takes less than five minutes to copy over a 4 GB partition. This way I can play around with a fresh clone of my system and return to normal operations if something goes wrong. H.

Well, I had no probs with them. Installed and runs just as they should.

I had w98, and my modem on COM3 worked. I upgraded to W2K, and it still worked. Now I switched MoBo and did a clean install, and I can't get the COM3 to work. On the Abit KA7-100 motherboard I have my external ISDN adapter (Asuscom) installed on COM 2, (COM 1 is currently not in use but my Pilot sync cradle will go there). Now I want to install an old ISA internal Sportster modem (just for faxing purposes). I install the modem, and it correctly installs and creates COM3, but the port carries a exclamation mark. Device Manager says "cannot find enough free resources". The IQ and mem range are the same as for COM1 (as they should be? - as least thats how it was when it worked, if I recall correctly). W2K doesn't let me change these settings in the default config. Any ideas on how to get it fixed ?? Do I need to fiddle around in bios or should it be fixable from within W2K ?? Other cards: Matrox G400 Max SCSI adapter SoundBlaster Live 1024 +Three free PCI slots Sportster 28.000 in the ISA slot ACPI is running H.

Sounds strange, how often is occasionally ? Maybe you want to try to pinpint the problem by - resetting CPU / videocard / memory - using just one memory stick - booting without Sound, LAN or SCSI card H.

Pardon my ignorance, but what is the problem ??? I think I've missed out on something. People who update their bios generally have the means to get and use a boot disk from an older OS. Or they can get a copy of one over the web (www.bootdisc.com for example). Or do you really claim that you have been unable to update the bios just because W2K can't provide you with a boot disk ??? You can boot the machine with one disk and load the bios from another, can't you ? The lawyers of big corporations who upgrade the bios of 1000 of machines (did this ever happen?)may have a little problem with getting legal boot disks. Do you claim that the friendly MS sales rep is refusing to give them a copy of a boot disk and threatening to sue if they boot once with an "illegal" boot disk to upgrade the bios? Where and when did this happen ?

I'd like it too... Pleaseplease please! harry.callahan@excite.com

Hmm, I'm getting a bit confused here. From from what I gather you should: - put the swap file on your fastest harddrive - put it on a different (physical drive) than W2K Logically, you this means that you did NOT install W2K on your fastest drive... Which one of the two "rules" is more important ?

What I want to achieve is to easily copy my Win 2000 main boot partition to another HD in the same machine, then boot from this copy and play around with it, being sure that the original stays untouched. Why do I want this? It feels like the fastest and easiest way of making a 1:1 copy of my "real" system to play around with, test drivers and software etc. Every now and then (or if something goes wrong) I just replace it with another fresh copy. With Win98 this was easily done in my system. My Abit BE6 MoBo (rev1) has an Highpoint ATA 66 controller on board, and have two physical HD:s, one on the ATA66 controller and one on the "standard" ATA 33 controller. In the (Award) bios one can set the boot sequence to be EXT, so that the machine boots from the ATA66 controller (calling the drive C). If I set the boot sequence to C (as opposed to EXT) it boots from the "standard" ATA33 controller. With win98 I made a copy (using Drive Image) of my main boot partition (C on the ATA66) and restored it to the HD on the ATA33. After this I could use Bios as a boot manager and boot from either drive. Both appeared as C when up and running. How can I best achieve the same result after upgrading to Win 2000 Pro? My old scheme doesn't work, because W2K "freezes" the names of the drives. It appears I boot from D (=the copy on the ATA33 controller): but all programs are loaded from the original C, still called C. If I start changing the drive names, programs don't work as their path is fixed in the registry. I don't believe a boot manager is a solution either, as I must change the boot sequence in Bios due to the fact that my HD:s are on different controllers. I could have two boot partitions on the ATA66 HD but I would rather boot from a different drive all together. Any ideas on how to easily create a copy of the existing boot partition including W2K + apps, and boot from this being sure that installations, settings, drivers do not touch the original?

error [This message has been edited by Dirty Harry (edited 30 May 2000).]

Nova, you mentioned in the beginning of this thread that you have a dual boot W2K / W2K system set up but I did not see anything on how you got this to install. I'd be grateful if you could post on how to install W2K "twice" so I can boot as it would be two separate systems. When I tried, the installation refused. My PC has two HD:s, one 27GB ATA66 (now C:, E: and F and 12 GB ATA33 (G: and H + CD (I and CD-RW (J and think I'd prefer to keep all partitions as FAT32. I've kept the OS and my main apps + all data on C: so that I could easily backup everything essential with Drive Image. Maybe not the best design, but it has worked well so far My second problem is related to what I want to do with the dual booting setup. Whenever I get as far as having the two bootable W2K partitions I'd like to copy all of my "real" Win 2000 main boot partition to the other partition (or even better to the other HD) in the same machine and boot from the copy. Why do I want this? I'd like to easily make a 1:1 copy of my current "real" system to play around with, test drivers and software etc. Every now and then (or when something goes wrong) I'll just replace it with another fresh copy. Even with two bootable W2K partitions I guess I'd still be unable to copy (using Drive Image) my first partition and move it to another partition to fool around with? Any ideas on how to do this staying sure those installations, settings and environment variables of the original remain untouched from work, tweaking and installations on the copy? I posted about an idea to use the different controllers on my machine (ATA66 and ATA33) to dual boot to the hardware forum recently but didn't get any answers that really solved it. [This message has been edited by Dirty Harry (edited 30 May 2000).]

Thanks Pupher and rbarbier for the suggestions. Thr problem is that I have my main boot drive, the one I want to be protected from my tinkering, on the ATA66. It seems ther is no way of disabling the HPT366 (?). Disabling the ATA33 doesn't help. It seems that the only possibility would be to have both the original and the test partition on the ATA66 drive, I guess I could use the boot.ini then to choose between which partition I start up with. --Harry