FDISK tells me ONLY DISK "0" CAN BE MADE ACTIVE!?!?! 2

[Guest_imported]

I have two hard disks on my machine. I want to use my other disk as the startup disk...but I already have my first hard drive active.

Now how do you make it unactive, and activate the other one?

FDISK tells me only disk "0" can be made active

both have windows 98, simply want to make my newer one active while KEEPING my old one.

 

[lgebhart]

Change the cabling on the motherboard. Attach the drive you want active to the Primary IDE 1 and the other to Secondary IDE or if you want both on the same ide, make the drive you want active the master (by putting the jumpers on the pins to set it master) on the Primary IDE 1 and the other the slave (putting jumpers on pins to make it slave) on Primary IDE 1, the run fdisk on the primary drive and make sure it is set to active. ggebhart@clover.net
I hope I never get too old or arrogant to learn something new!

 

[aldog]

Ohhhh........
Ok, so the startup drive HAS to be on the PRIMARY CHANNEL!

stupid me...hahaha

So that means
Primary Channel=0
and
Secondary channel=1?

 

[MA5]

Hi Quest
I have kept the text below as simple as possible so that it could be useful for all.

BIOS is the one that needs to know where to boot your Operating System from.

Fdisk is used to partition a Hard Disk Drive and one partition per disk needs to be made active for DOS. Operating System resides in the active partition. As you have more than one HDD, there is no need to have more than one partition in your new Drive.

Go to BIOS and make your new HDD a higher boot up priority than the old one.
If your new HDD is sharing a ribbon with another device, make sure one is Master and the other Slave.
- Ribbon connected to IDE 1 has Primary Master & Primary Slave devices on it.
- Ribbon connected to IDE 2 has Secondary Master & Secondary Slave devices on it.

Some manufacturers stamp their IDEs as 0 and 1 rather than 1 and 2. Therefore lower number is the Primary and the higher on Secondary.

It is a standard practice to connect the HDD with the OS in it as Primary Master.

Good luck

 

[lgebhart]

Ma5,

Well said! I believe you have answered aldog's question.

Have you thought about putting this information up as a faq? Just think some other people might have some use for it!

ggebhart@clover.net
I hope I never get too old or arrogant to learn something new!

 

[edfair]

You could go for a google search for "boot manager" and find several that will allow the drive choice. Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.