Daft question re SATA HD.

[tony draper]

Just got another SATA HD,one notes they appear to be devoid of the wee links that make em Master or Slave,does one decide in bios which is to be the gafa if one has two sata disks in the machine?

[green granite]

No links needed, just plug into the next SATA skt vacant.

[tony draper]

Indeed one gathered that Mr G, but which of the two will the Draper home made super puter boot from? both have winxp installed.

[Albert Square]

Puter automatically looks for the OS and boots from there. If you wanted to put in a second OS, then you can use BIOS to tell which disc to boot from. I think.

[Sprogget]

In my experience, I have had to tell the bios which hdd has the os. It's an easy thing since it either boots or it doesn't. Simples.

[hurn]

You should be able to select the drive you wish to boot from in the bios, under boot options or similar.

It will probably list your drives as 1. WDC320Gb and 2. WDC160Gb for example.

You can then use 'page-up/down' to swap them around depending on which one you want to boot from.

[tony draper]

yer ok chaps thanks, that is what I though,I usually have two or thee Hdisks I regularly swap around, makes life a bit simpler.

[green granite]

Sorry Tony I didn't realise you had multiple OSes.

What you're supposed to do with multiple OSes is install as dual/triple boot systems, then just select them from the menu that comes up on start-up

[Sprogget]

From Vista on, the boot.ini stuff is gone, replaced by bcd. When I was running Vista & 7 side by side, I used easy bcd editor to sort out what booted as preference. It's a free download & works perfectly. Basically a bcd gui editor.

[tony draper]

From whence doth one acquire this dual boot type system? one is running Win XP Pro.

[green granite]

With the first disc installed and running XP, install the second disc, format it then install the OS to that disc from the CD, it will automatically set up the dual boot system for you, the second install becomes the default OS. ie if you do nothing at start up that's the one that will start up.

[Sprogget]

...but it will offer you the choice at the boot up screen.