IDE and SATA hard drive

[holtover]

Hello,
I have just built my first machine and I have an IDE ribbon with a CD drive and IDE drive on it. The CD is master and IDE is the slave. Additionally, I have a SATA drive. I would like to have an operating system on both, that way I can just go into boot command and switch hard drives. When I want to use a different operating system. Unfortunately, that is not working. The system only recognizes one hard drive at a time. I have to switch the capbles to connect to the different hard drives. Please Help!

 

[John_VanKirk]

Hello, & Welcome to Tom's Hardware!

Couple things to try:

On the IDE cable, it's much better to set the HDD as the Master, then the CD as the Slave. That's a function of changing the positioning on the cable and switching the mni jumper accordingly.

When your computer starts up, it runs the BIOS Post, then reads the StartUp configuration settings in the CMOS on the MB. Then it looks for the Partition set as Active to know where to find the Boot Manager files on the System Disk, which presents a list of OS's available if more than one, which points to the Boot Loader containing the Operating System.

I would guess just the one Disk has the Active Partition set, so that one boots OK, the other Disk doesen't
This is not dual booting -
Theoretically you could go into Disk Management, and set the second Disk System Partition to Active, and then as you suggested, change the HDD Boot Order in the BIOS when you want the other OS to run. It's much trickier to remove that Active designation once it's set, but can be done using DiskPart.

Microsoft's Windows Command Line Manual says "Only one partition should be marked as Active. However. frequently a second HDD is added to a computer system as as second drive that has the System files, an OS, and Data fles, that is marked as Active, and it functions just as a Data drive not being in the HDD 1st Boot Order. So I'm not 100% sure.

Might see what others have to say about your idea.

If you are using Win-7 or Vista, and Win-XP, setting things up in a dual boot mode, and then reverting that back to say Win-7 can also be quite frustrating.