Dual Booting without MBR changes.

Hi All

There are a lot of Dual booting posts but I've found a novel and simple way
which boes not require the MBR or Boot.ini modified so mucking around with
other operating systems Linux,Vista etc. causes no problems with the Primary
OS.

It won't work with all setups though as it needs to be a fairly new
motherboard to support it. It will also only work with 2 or more physical
drives and they may have to be SATA?

This is how it works with my ASUS M/B

The BIOS can select any drive to be the primary boot drive and this would be
set normally to HDD0 where your primary OS is installed. (the default single
OS method).

Changing this setting to select a different disc say HDD1. This means that
the BIOS will try to boot from this alternate disc by default. With this
setting (or more likely 1st boot DVD second boot HDD1) you can install Vista
or any OS to HDD1 which will not modify the contents on HDD0.

Now for the cool bit, Set the BIOS to boot from the HDD of your most used OS
and with no further action it will always boot to this OS. But you can
either change the BIOS when you want to use the other OS (a bit of an
inconvenience) or if you are lucky as I am you may be able to press F8 or
simular during POST and get a boot menu and select which disc to boot from.

This method is so cool as you can format drives and change OS willy nilly
with no worry about how to repair the boot sector MBR or boot.ini. You can
even add or remove drives without upset. Each OS can also see the other
drives if the OS supports the other drive formats, and the drive letters
will be set as you would expect, with the booted OS being the C: drive.

I will never use a boot manager again and will always use M/B's that support
this.

Hope this helps some people.

Toby

Mmm I guess no one else is using this method and not interested in it
either.

This surprises me as it seems the perfect control over booting from multiple
drives, regardless of OS.

Toby

"Toby" <> wrote in message
news:...
> Mmm I guess no one else is using this method and not interested in it
> either.
>
> This surprises me as it seems the perfect control over booting from
multiple
> drives, regardless of OS.
>
> Toby
>



That method is certainly a good one ...but as an experimentor...
I have dozens of different installtions...
so I use removable drives