Major freakin' scare!

vlad

vlad

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OK, so it's not all that bad.... [unsure]

'k, so I'm a MAJOR newbie at windoze, being a graphic artist, I've always been tied to Mac 'puters. Anyway, I get a wild hair and decide to build myself a frankenstein of a PC. At least with a PC, I can play a few racing games and learn first hand 'bout the dark side.

I have ended up with three hard drives, so I go buy a SIIG Ultra ATA/133 card. I was thinking that I could have all three drives on their own channel and improve performance a bit. Boy was I in for a crash course in booting from a PCI ATA card!

After fiddling around for most of the evening, I eventually was able to boot from each of the two drives that I had OSs set up on. Now two of the three drives were partitioned, each with an OS and then files and apps on the second partitions. Well, I get all wrapped up in getting the flippin' things to boot, I forget about the 7+ gigs of files that aren't backed up!
[ohcrap]

As I had the Win2000 CD repairing a disk that had all of these files on the second partition, I realize that these files/apps didn't exist anywhere but on the disk that I'm messing with! I envisioned having to recreate all of these files as Windows was doing it's repair. It's cool. The files are getting burned to DVD as I type.

Now here's the part where I really need some assistance....
Does anyone know what I need to do to be able to select the boot drive on the PCI card? I've hacked the boot.ini file to work with both boot drives hooked to the motherboard, so I can select which drive I wish to boot from at startup, but I'll be durned if I can figure how to set this up with the second bootable drive hooked to the PCI card. Any assistance would be most appreciated!
 
frolf

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danggggg that is pretty freaky. I always keep my important stuff backed up in my room, away from my computer.

As for booting from PCI? do you mean you have a hard drive that is connected to the PCI bridge?
 
vlad

vlad

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frolf said:
danggggg that is pretty freaky. I always keep my important stuff backed up in my room, away from my computer.

As for booting from PCI? do you mean you have a hard drive that is connected to the PCI bridge?
Click to expand...
Yeah, the PCI ATA card currently has one drive connected to each bus.

PuShAkOv said:
Did you try setting the boot order in BIOS?
Click to expand...
I did try setting the boot drive with the BIOS, but the 'puter keeps booting from the drive connected to the motherboard. It's my guess that the BIOS only selects drives connected to the motherboard. Hence the reason that I'm trying to hack the BOOT.ini file.
 
vlad

vlad

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bahnstormer said:
i hate ata HD controller cards. poopy. if u're installing the OS fresh, setup the OS on its own then add the controller card after windows is installed
Click to expand...
That's what I've done to this point. It does boot off of the drive connected to the ATA card, but only if there is no drive connected to the MB.
 
PuShAkOv

PuShAkOv

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Things to be aware of:

- Make sure your promary HD is at the end of the cable, middle is for slave.
- Make sure jumpers are clearly set, master - slave.
- Your ATA card could have a promary slot and a secondary slot.
- Some controllers have a DOS utility where you can set booting order, does yours?
- Unless you have a HD over 120 Gigs or you are putting in over 2 HDs (3 with one CD-ROM), why bother with a controller?
- This stuff could be an ass.

Hope this helps.
 
Last edited:
E

epj3

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Yea you're going into territory that is pretty damn hard. I would say just install it on the hard drive, then afterwards add the other hard drives.
 
wileycoyote

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I'll assume you have all IDE (or EIDE) drives, which means that you can have two disks per cable, one master one slave. The drives typically have jumpers to select one of the following 3 options: Cable Select (CS), Master (MA) Slave (SL). Set one MA and one SL per cable. If you have only 1 drive on a cable, use MA or remove the jumper.

Each cable represents an IDE Controller (may be on the system board, may be an add in card). Your BIOS will let you choose the boot order only for the onboard controllers, but if you are using the multi-boot options in Windows (booting only to MS Operating Systems), it doesn't matter what disk is the boot disk, just as long as it has the boot.ini file. In the boot.ini file you can specify the Controller, Disk, Partion, and directory of the OS you wan to boot from. See the link below for an MS document on the Windows 2000 boot.ini file.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;311578

Multi(x) = x is the controller number, zero is the first.
Disk(x) = x is the disk number, 0 is master and 1 is slave
Rdisk(x) = used by RAID sets always set to 0
Partition(x) = partion number, 1 is the first **Note 0 is first for all other settings
\windows = the windows directory, winnt for NT and 2000, windows for 98, ME, XP

If this doesn't answer your question, give the following information and I'll see if I can help:

Number of controllers you have:
Number of Drives you have:
OS boot preferences (i.e. controller 1, disk 1, Windows 98; controller 1, disk 2, Windows 2000; etc.)
Explain why you want to boot from multiple disks.
 
vlad

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OK, let's see if I can clear this up...

First I have seen tests that show that two drives on the same controller slows up disk read/write times. Hence I get the wild idea of a ATA controller PCI card. One drive per ATA controller. Currently the configuration is three drives, two of which I wish to be able to boot from. Each drive is set as master connected by a single device cable, one hooked to motherboard, one hooked to controller 0 of the ATA PCI card, the third hooked to controller 1 of the ATA PCI card.

Secondly, I prefer Win2000 over XP, at least what little I have tinkered with XP. XP tries to do too much for you, some things that I prefer to control myself. Not to mention the nasty connections back to the Microsoft web site that XP performs.

wileycoyote; Thanks for the reference to Microsoft's web page. That's where I discovered to set up the BOOT.ini with both drives connected to the motherboard, (master/slave config). Where I am having problems is identifying the ATA card in the BOOT.ini file. I guess your "layman's" terminology in your reply helps a bit. The reason that I wish to be able to boot from two partitions is for repair purposes, I plan on taking a crash course, (self taught), in Windows and assume that I will be buggering up and OS installation or three. The second OS will allow me to edit/fix/explore the other OS more easily.

So, to set up the BOOT.ini to point to the PCI card, I should set this up?

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect
multi(1)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect

Anything else I can answer?
Thanks for the assistance guys! [thumb]
 
E

epj3

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vlad said:
I'm trying ta learn windows not unix. I have OS X to learn unix.

Plus is Need for Speed available for linux?
Click to expand...
nope, nothing is except ut2003 lol.

Windows is nothing special, I gotta tell ya. And I already will warn you, windows 2000 has countless updates, so I hope you have broadband and a lot of patience
 
wileycoyote

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Thanks for the clarification Vlad. I also prefer Win2K, although I use XP Pro at work. I've finally "dummed" XP down enough that it looks and acts just like Win2K. There are a few tools in XP I find usefull (remote desktop is be coolest). Your reason for dual boot is sound. I have a second copy of Win2K (or Win2003) on all my servers for that very reason (\WinSOS). This is easily accomplished by reinstalling Windows and, picking a different drive and/or directory. The OS boot files (boot.ini, ntldr, ntedetect.com) must be on the disk that your bios tries to boot from, which must also be the active partition as listed in Disk Administrator. If you get the OS select screen, and you can boot to one of the OS you are very close. I'm not sure if this is the case, or if you can boot from the drives attached to the onboard IDE channels (a channel is treated as a controller). If this is the case, it is most likely that your system is enumerating the system board controller first, multi(0) and multi(1), then the add-in card controller, multi(2) and multi(3). Once you get all this sorted out, you may still have problems as the afore mentioned boot files must be the same Service Pack as the system files. If you load the SP (or certain hotfixes) on one OS version, you may not be able to boot to the second as the files do match the boot files. And when you finally get all this sorted out and working, format a diskette using Win2k, copy the boot files to the diskette. You can then boot from this floppy (providing the system files are mostly intact) if the active partion were to become corrupt. You can also use the floppy to boot to the "non service packed" OS and update it as well (when both OS are updated, be sure update the floppy).

Good luck, and post the error message you get if it still no worky...
 
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