Hi guys and girls,

Just a few thoughts about some recent problems. My HDD went beserk and nothing I could do would revive it. Not chkdsk, Acronis, Partition Manager, or XP Repair, etc. etc. I tried them all without any luck. So what to do?

I had a new spare drive sitting on a shelf so I installed that and proceeded to re-install XP but the install routine got the 2 drives mixed up and wanted to install on the old drive which was exactly what I didn't want to do because there might be a change of repairing it. So I disconnected the old drive and proceeded to install a new copy of xp on the new drive. Then came the tricky bit because I wanted to 'see' the old drive in the new install (to have a chance of maybe repairing it) but prevent the bios from booting from it! What now?

I reconnected the old drive and went into boot options in the bios selecting the new drive to boot first after cd and floppy. This worked fine and now I was able to see the 'old' non-working bootdrive in the new xp install. I then used Acronis once again to attempt to repair this drive. It proceeded to do so and behold after 6 hours I had a repaired and working again drive. After testing it would even boot as normal as before. I now have a system with 2 bootable drives and simply select the one I want in the bios when starting up the system. This got me to thinking about dual booting.

It seems much more logical to install separate systems on different drives and then select the boot drive from the bios when starting the computer. This avoids all sorts of problems with boot loaders etc. which are hard to get rid of and can create serious problems. It also made me wonder why we can't assign a new name or an alias to a drive IN THE BIOS to easier distinguish between them. As it is we have to carefully note the serial # of the drives as shown in the bios and then select the one we want. It would be so much easier to rename them with an alias or some such IN THE BIOS!

Anyway, I thought this might be of interest to some of you.

Cheers

I've been thinking about this one all arvo, I reckon a winner would be to use a boot manager from either a usb drive or a sd card (or even floppy or cd) as it would save the effort of going into the bios. Also that way if the boot manager stuffs up it wouldn't be end of the world as you could easily restore it or use the bios...just a thought.

PS its a pretty good idea in general Willem, as it protects the different OS's from each other and drives are so cheap now it is not cost prohibitive.

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Love is all fun and games until someone loses an eye or gets pregnant

hi guys,
Thanks for your answers. Much appreciated.
Some interesting ideas here. The Virtual Box is great, however, its no good if your drive goes belly-up! If you can't boot your drive you can't get into your virtual box unless you've got it on a usb drive.
Regards
Willem