Automatic Boot Disk redirector?

[Yousuf Khan]

Hi, Paul.

Yes, I probably should apologize to you and Rod and Arno - and Yousuf.
I'm guilty of being focused solely on Windows, especially Win7. I don't
normally read comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage and didn't notice before
my Replies that Yousuf had cross-posted his question to that NG, as well
as to alt.windows7.general, where I was reading it. If I had noticed, I
would have clarified that my remarks apply only to Windows. In my youth
<g> I experimented with other OSes, up until about OS/2, but haven't
looked at Linux, or at other systems since then.

Thanks for pointing out the differences in booting with non-Windows
systems.

Well, maybe I should've asked in a Linux group as well, since it is
installed and it gets affected as well. But the majority of my debugging
is being done under Windows, so I didn't want to confuse the issue.

I'm also using Grub (Legacy) as my boot loader on my boot disk, but that
really doesn't make a difference to this problem. Whether I'm using Grub
or Windows' own loader directly, they are both effectively bypassed when
the boot disk order gets messed up by the BIOS.

So getting back to the original problem, there is no boot disk
redirector utility that can effectively just tell the BIOS that "Hey,
I'm not the boot disk, go to the next disk"?

Yousuf Khan

 

[Wolf K]

This is why I asked the question in the first place, when external disks
are occasionally plugged in during boot, they mess up the hard disk
priority order in the BIOS. So a drive that is not my boot disk may be
listed ahead of my boot disk in the BIOS disk priority.

This is weird. If physical disk zero (HDD-0 on my BIOS) is the first
boot device, then that's the one it should boot from. Maybe you haven't
plugged your boot drive into the disk-zero location. Both SATA and IDE
count the disk number from one end of the plug strip/bank to the other,
make sure you've connected the disks and the external plugs in the
correct sequence.

HTH&GoodLuck,
Wolf K.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

This is weird. If physical disk zero (HDD-0 on my BIOS) is the first
boot device, then that's the one it should boot from. Maybe you haven't
plugged your boot drive into the disk-zero location. Both SATA and IDE
count the disk number from one end of the plug strip/bank to the other,
make sure you've connected the disks and the external plugs in the
correct sequence.

No, it's quite definitely disk #0 (first disk enumerated). But for some
reason my BIOS feels the need to give external disks higher priorities
whenever they are plugged in, until I manually reorder their priorities
in the BIOS setup.

Yousuf Khan