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Can anyone tell me how to change the BIOS to boot from my slave drive first. I just got done looking through every possible BIOS setting and all I found was a boot sequence setting, however, all it showed was

1. Diskette Drive

2. Hard Disk Drive C:\

3. IDE CD-ROM device

 

I need to be able to boot from my D:\ drive (extra internal HD) first which is my slave drive. I heard somewhere that I may have to make this a system disk to make this possible so I guess I have two questions. 1) how do I make my D drive a system disk 2) how do i boot from it first

I have no experience with external drives or those little usb thingys, so take my advise with a grain of salt:

 

but if it isn't recognizing it on your system could it be your jumper needs to be in a different location? Do you have the instuctions for that harddrive or is there a label on your jumper pins? Im just guessing but I think your little short-plug or jumper need to be on the pin pair for slave.

 

They have ones for master and ones for slave, they also have ones for "CS" which stands for cable select, but I don't know what that means.

 

If your drive has no label and you don't have the instructions that came with it you can still get the info by going to the manufacturers website.

Make sure that your usb settings in the bios are enabled and have legacy support. Look for an option that says something along the lines of 'enable usb boot'. Then reboot and see if your usb hd is in the boot sequence list. If not, at boot rather than pressing the 'setup' or 'enter bios' key see if there is a boot key (on Dell's it is usually f12).

There could be several different answers to this depending on your motherboard and BIOS.

 

With some BIOS you don't get a chance to select a drive that isn't bootable, so it's not offered as an option. Other BIOS allow you to select "IDE hard drive" and then you get a sub-menu to pick which drive.

 

Some things to consider-

 

Try using "CS" or Cable Select on your drives if you have the support on your MB and have the 80-lead IDE cables. It's better for several reasons than using Master/Slave hardwired/jumpered settings.

 

Is your BIOS up-to-date? Some mfctrs rolled out cut-down BIOS options which can be improved with a BIOS flash to a later version

 

You probably won't be able to see or select your disk unless it's a bootable system disk. Installing XP onto it, for example, will make it both bootable and active. You can achieve the same with a partition tool like Partition Magic or Acronis.

 

Unless you've got a very restricted BIOS you should be able to overcome these problems. The fact that the drive is Slave on the IDE chain should make no difference to its bootability.

Can anyone tell me how to change the BIOS to boot from my slave drive first. I just got done looking through every possible BIOS setting and all I found was a boot sequence setting, however, all it showed was

1. Diskette Drive

2. Hard Disk Drive C:\

3. IDE CD-ROM device

 

I need to be able to boot from my D:\ drive (extra internal HD) first which is my slave drive. I heard somewhere that I may have to make this a system disk to make this possible so I guess I have two questions. 1) how do I make my D drive a system disk 2) how do i boot from it first

 

In MY BIOS setup there are two "preference panes" of interest: the one that you describe (boot sequence) and a second labeled "hard drive". The hard drive pane allows me to choose which hard drive shows up in the boot sequence list. I can boot from any of 3 internal hard drives, an IDE hard drive (OSX86 8f1111g), or either of two SATA drives (OSX86 8f1099 or WinXP Pro). If your BIOS is different, it would be useful to list your specs in case someone has a similar machine.

 

:P

G

 

Motherboard: Intel D915GAG (10.4.3/8F1111g)

CPU: Pentium 4/630 3 GHz, 2MB Cache

RAM: 2GB DDR

GPU: GMA900 w/Dell ADD2 DVI adapter (supporting QE/CI at 1920 x 1200)

Display: DELL 2405FPW 24" LCD

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