Kenneth Cavanaugh
08-05-2002, 07:12 PM
I have a system on which I would like to run multiple operating systems.The system has two ATA hard drives installed as Primary IDE Master and Slave. And a SCSI controller with two hard drives attached to it. My plan is to install the OSs on the IDE drives and have an ODBC database on the SCSI drives.
I wish I could remember the steps I followed to create the situation I'm in. Best I can remember: I created a Primary partition on my Primary IDE Master drive with Partition Magic. Then I booted the system from a Windows 2000 Installation disk in my CD-ROM drive. I began the Windows 2000 setup program and everything went smoothly until the program attempted to Save Settings. Then it reported a memory error, and the system was hung-up. So I rebooted. After I rebooted I found a partition with HPFS format on the Primary IDE Master drive. I deleted it. When I rebooted my IDE drives weren't there. I proceeded to make the IDE drives visible again by running the AMI BIOS Setup utility, and by running Hardware Installation routine inside Windows 2000. I performed these operations multiple times. Making incremental improvements. I was able to get the system back to where it recognized both IDE drives with 100% unallocated space on them.
When I attempted to install Windows 2000 for the second time, the installation failed again. This time the error message said, inaccessible boot device. Reboot and check to see if your drives are properly configured and terminated.
It is my understanding that when a system boots the ROM BIOS reads the Master Control Block stored in the first sector of the boot drive. The MCB contains information about how the drive is partitioned and which partition is active. Next, a load program stored in the active partition is executed. The loader program loads the OS stored in that partition into memory. In my case, I observe the correct hard disk information in the BIOS Setup. The system boots from the designated boot device. It loads the operating system stored in the active partition. But FDISK does not always see both IDE drives. If I am booting to Windows 2000, Disk Manager fails to see the correct partition information. I would like to know how a partition program finds out what drives are on the system, and how they are partitioned? Can someone help me?
I wish I could remember the steps I followed to create the situation I'm in. Best I can remember: I created a Primary partition on my Primary IDE Master drive with Partition Magic. Then I booted the system from a Windows 2000 Installation disk in my CD-ROM drive. I began the Windows 2000 setup program and everything went smoothly until the program attempted to Save Settings. Then it reported a memory error, and the system was hung-up. So I rebooted. After I rebooted I found a partition with HPFS format on the Primary IDE Master drive. I deleted it. When I rebooted my IDE drives weren't there. I proceeded to make the IDE drives visible again by running the AMI BIOS Setup utility, and by running Hardware Installation routine inside Windows 2000. I performed these operations multiple times. Making incremental improvements. I was able to get the system back to where it recognized both IDE drives with 100% unallocated space on them.
When I attempted to install Windows 2000 for the second time, the installation failed again. This time the error message said, inaccessible boot device. Reboot and check to see if your drives are properly configured and terminated.
It is my understanding that when a system boots the ROM BIOS reads the Master Control Block stored in the first sector of the boot drive. The MCB contains information about how the drive is partitioned and which partition is active. Next, a load program stored in the active partition is executed. The loader program loads the OS stored in that partition into memory. In my case, I observe the correct hard disk information in the BIOS Setup. The system boots from the designated boot device. It loads the operating system stored in the active partition. But FDISK does not always see both IDE drives. If I am booting to Windows 2000, Disk Manager fails to see the correct partition information. I would like to know how a partition program finds out what drives are on the system, and how they are partitioned? Can someone help me?