Anna,
Could we skip over all the technical details for just a moment?  What is
your desired end result?  What configuration do you want to end up with?

SATA drives are generally connected one per cable.  IDE or ATAPI drives can
generally be connected two per cable.  It doesn't matter what the device
is.  IDE drives (will generally) have a jumper which allows you to define
master, slave or cable select (CS).  You can have HD1, HD2, HD3 and CD/DVD
in the system so long as they are jumpered correctly.  You can even mix SATA
and IDE in some computers, but I don't want to go there.

You can get into trouble really quickly with multiple boot systems.  That
said, I've had experience with multiple boot on multiple partitions on one
drive, multiple drives and multiple partitions on multiple drives.  The
bottom line is that Windows just uses one MBR (master boot record) per
system.  If you have a hard drive (HD1) with Windows XP on it, add another
drive (HD2) and load Windows XP on it too, the MBR on HD1 will be updated to
created a boot menu that shows two XP choices.  If you remove HD1, then the
system won't boot because the MBR has been removed.  If you want to be able
to boot from either HD1 or HD2 then you need to remove HD1 before loading XP
on HD2.  You can then reinstall HD1 later and make a choice in the BIOS
which drive to boot from.  Make sense?  You could opt for a 3rd party boot
manager which will give you the option to boot to either HD1 or HD2 without
going into the BIOS.

As far as getting into the BIOS, it is different on different computers.
Common keystrokes are DEL, F1, F2, F10.

I think what you want to do is not that complicated, but I've lost track of
your end goals.

Ron Jobe



On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 10:51 PM, Hugh Vandervoort <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 7:09 PM, Computer9f <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > Plan-C
> >
> > I have 3 IDE hard drives.  Two are installed (one is new).  Someone (at
> another forum, I think) told me that I could install an IDE hard drive on
> the SAME IDE CABLE with my DVDWriter.
> >
> > I just spoke with the Geek Squad and they say NO - that the PC sees
> everything on a single cable the same way, that they must both be hard
> drives, or both be CD/DVD drives.  Of course, he also said you could set
> WINDOWS to let you choose which drive to boot, which as I see it looks
> clearly impossible, since when you are booting, you don't have Windows yet.
>
> There's no problem installing a HD on the same IDE cable with a DVD.
> I've heard more than one evil story about Geek squad, but that one
> takes the cake.
>
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>           web based bulletinboard for questions and answers:
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>



-- 
Ron Jobe

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