Is their a way to boot from slave HD?

[Chris Freeland]

My old Dell 500MHZ PIII died last week and I am not in a position to buy or build a new machine yet so my wife bought a 2nd hand Dell 800MHZ PIII for $50 from her work. I combined machines basically by salvaging parts from my dead machine including the HD. The original HD had Windows 98 on it and some Nursing applications that my wife likes to have at home and she has some favorite games that work on 98 and not on XP, I however will use XP exclusively. I had XP on dead machine's HD and I made it my new master HD thinking I could do a duel boot so my wife could access it when she needed to, however it does not give me a choice when booting up and goes straight to XP since it is on the master HD, is their any way to make the pc boot when needed, to that slave HD and 98 without re-configuring the hardware?

[firephoto]

You'll need either a boot manager or you need to have 98 show up as the "C" drive, and XP be whatever "letter" it assumes for the hdd and XP's boot thingy should see this and ask you when the machine boots. Your win98 install from the other machine will most likely choke when it boots to the new hardware so you might end up having to install it clean to make it work. Partition Magic has a boot manager, and there are some shareware ones out there, or you could use GRUB with a couple of chainloader (for xp, not sure what 98 needs in grub) lines with the proper drive references.
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/
http://www.gnu.org/manual/grub-0.92/html_mono/grub.html
I was using LILO with my mandrake install, but switched to grub and it worked so I left it. When I moved to Gentoo I used grub and learned how it really worked, and learned to like it. It has an auto complete search thing when you're manually entering in boot parameters so it helps for getting the syntax correct. It's a GNU thing tho so it might polute your MS box. ;) Once you understand how it works it's really usefull, but it 's probaby a bit much for just doing XP + 98.
Here's my menu.lst file (grub.conf)

timeout 10
color black/cyan yellow/cyan
i18n (hd1,0)/boot/grub/messages
keytable (hd1,0)/boot/us.klt
altconfigfile (hd1,0)/boot/grub/menu.once
default 0

title gentoo-2.6.0-test9-nvidia_OSS
kernel (hd0,2)/boot/kernel-2.6.0-test9-nvidia_OSS root=/dev/hda6

title gentoo-2.6.0-test9-nvidia_ALSA
kernel (hd0,2)/boot/kernel-2.6.0-test9-nvidia root=/dev/hda6

title gentoo-2.6.0-test9-nvidia_nomod_ALSA
kernel (hd0,2)/boot/kernel-2.6.0-test9-nvidia_nomod root=/dev/hda6

title linux-mandrake_NOT_TESTED_WITH_NVIDIA
kernel (hd1,0)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hde1 devfs=mount hdc=ide-scsi hdd=ide-scs$
initrd (hd1,0)/boot/initrd.img

title failsafe
kernel (hd1,0)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hde1 failsafe devfs=nomount hdc=ide-scsi $
initrd (hd1,0)/boot/initrd.img

title windows
root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

title floppy
root (fd0)
chainloader +1

It's pretty easy to see how it works. (hd0,0) is the first partition of the first ide interface (with harddrive attached). Just read the docs if you decide to use it, it actually might be more reliable than trying to let XP manage your booting.

Another option would be to change your ide settings in your bios every time you boot to a different OS. Basicly changing the first drive the system sees. Master/Slave.

Have fun!
;)

[Chris Freeland]

Thanks for the info and links. I do not have a disk for 98 so a re-install of 98 is not an option, however the 98 os was the os on this machine when my wife bought it and should recognize most of the hardware so maybe I will not have to do a re-instal, I also added the phone modem, a better Video card and plan on adding DVD-Rom/CD-RW combo from the dead machine. I did have to do a XP repair-install after I added the HD with XP on it from the dead machine and made it the master, so far it has worked well and I managed to save all my settings, applications and files, however I did have to re-register it with MS and do Windows updates again. I thought about doing the re-set in the Bios but I really do not want my wife to have to change the Bios setting every time she wants to play one of her old 98 only games. I do have a disk that came with a PC magazine that I purchased with partition magic on it that I may try as you sugested. This older machine combo is just a temporary measure until I am ready to purchase or build a new machine with larger HD and more bells and whistles ;) .

[NEBUGEATER]

SOunds like for all that trouble I would try and get my hands on a second $50 machine and leave each HD in a seperate box and use what the one you need. If you can lay your hands on another old machine it may be less time and $$ than the time it will take to get everything configured to work in the one machine without reinstalling everything.

[Chris Freeland]

SOunds like for all that trouble I would try and get my hands on a second $50 machine and leave each HD in a seperate box and use what the one you need. If you can lay your hands on another old machine it may be less time and $$ than the time it will take to get everything configured to work in the one machine without reinstalling everything.

That is a possibility, however rather then setting up a duel boot I may just have my wife load her old games to XP and use the Compatibility Wizard and download updated drivers for them if necessary, if that works I can then wipe the D drive clean for a little extra storage space.