Peter mattson
Posted 4 years, 5 months ago
Joined: 12 years, 5 months ago
Some time back I raised the question here, of whether it mattered if I had my OS (Windows XP2) on my slave hard drive instead of the Master. (This situation arose because of sheer sloppiness)
Anyhow I had various replies but the consensus was that it didn't really matter. And that's how it has been for at least a year and I have had no trouble. However of late, my Computer had taken upon itself to randomly reboot for unknown reasons. Each time it did this, it rebooted to the Master and of course, couldn't find the Operating System. I had to then go into BIOS and reset the HDrives so that the slave became the first boot. Although things have been back to normal for a while I would like to set up the slave to become the Master without having to mess around with jumper settings internally. Can this be done in any way externally? (I have three drives all WDigital all the same size.)
Lawrence Glynn
Posted 4 years, 5 months ago
Joined: 12 years, 5 months ago
Re: Booting from slave hard drive
Peter
The master/slave arrangment is determined entirely by the jumpers on the drives or, if jumpered to cable select, the position on the cable (end furthest from m/b is master). So you have no choice if you want the boot drive to be the master.
However, if you do change the master/slave arrangement you will probably need to edit the boot.ini file (in the C: root directory of the boot drive) and change the drive number. WinNT and 2000 and later use this rather complicated process which does allow a degree of control of which drive and partition is the boot one, but there is not default to let the BIOS take over as there was with Win98.
But, if the BIOS keeps resetting the boot order this means that the hardware keeps thinking it has a new arrangement of drives, which maybe why the PC keeps rebooted.
I have seen a few circumstances where the motherboard loses contact with the (a) SATA drive and WinXP gives a blue screen and either stops or reboots. If you have auto-restart enable (Control Panel | System | Advanced | Startup and Recovery) you will probably not see the blue screen. Chances are the STOP information will indicate a drive issue. In the cases I have investigated the m/b has been the fault, all early SATA implementations.
Chris Burrage
Posted 4 years, 5 months ago
Joined: 12 years, 5 months ago
Re: Booting from slave hard drive
If Windows is installed on "D" and you swap it to master, the PC will see the drive as "C" and it won't run. This is not why you are having a problem, something else is wrong. First thing to check would be the mobo battery. If the BIOS is losing settings, the battery may be flat. Does the time remain accurate when the machine has its issues? If not then the battery is the likely culprit. Check also for bloated or leaking capacitors. This is not good, it will lead to odd power issues, and is an indication that the time has arrived for a new motherboard.
Chris B
