Dual Boot Problems with Ultra ATA 100 Card

[Guest_imported]

Hello,

I recently purchased the SIIG dual channel ultra ATA 100 controller but am having some strange effects when setting up a multiboot system with Win2kPro and Win98SE. Maybe you can help point out what I am doing wrong.
Scenario:

40g Maxtor Ultra ATA 100 drive on the SIIG ATA 100 card - primary slot
cdrom and 6g Samsung UDMA drive on ATA 100 card - secondary slot

I first formatted the drive to fat32 and installed win 98. After the 98 installation, I proceed to install win2k. The documentation on the controller card says I have to hit F1 or F11 during the win2k installation each time the pc reboots. I did this each time and the install went well.

After the install though of win2k, It appears that I have to continue to hit the F1 or F11 to boot up win2k. This seemed strange, considering the docs said it only had to be done during the install. If I do not hit the key, then it errors out stating that it cannot read from the disk. If I do hit the key, it boots up win2k just fine, but it does not give me the win2k boot loader to select which O/S to boot from.

After booting into win2k, I am able to verify that it did not upgrade 98 to 2k, but did as it should, installed a separate copy.

Our hardware budget has been cut so we will be trying to implement these cards into, possibly, a couple hundred machines or so. This install was for test purposes.

Any ideas?

Thanks,



Jack Fobel
jfobel@tstonramp.com

 

[DaveGoTech]

We are continually amazed at how Company Managers are so ignorant of economics. They can readily see that cutting hardware from the budget will save them money and look good to their boss. However, the same manager has no problems assigning an employee to select components, order, build, configure & test a PC - under the assumption that money is being saved, when in reality, the money "spent" using labor resources (& associated overhead costs) and lost productivity usually accounts for at least DOUBLE and sometimes TRIPLE the real costs of simply purchasing a new PC, especially when you can buy a ready-made PC for about $600. The thought of implementing a configuration such as this on a 'couple hundred' machines is scary.
The scenario reported above should alone be cause for concern about continuing down this path.
The point is, why opt for a complicated solution (which is bound to cause continual aggravation in the future) when there are numerous other alternatives to choose from.