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Booting from a SCSI drive over IDE

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7 replies

by mjchekal

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I have a Computer that the user requires that they boot from, a SCSI drive installed as device 0 on the chain. They would like to use a IDE drive as the Data drive. The SCSI drive is currently setup as a dual boot Win95/Win2k Pro. Is there a way to make this happen the IDE drive can be set back to new/fresh load. I am looking to do this with as little investment as possible. Thanks in advance for any help that you can be.

7 replies

by bill cassada

I am assuming your computer has a SCSI controller built-in...or that you have a third-party controller installed. Simlpy set the BIOS on the controller to boot the SCSI before the IDE. If the SCSI BIOS is on-board, you may have to go into the computer BIOS and tell it to boot from the SCSI controller, then IDE. If you don't have a controller installed I recommend Adaptec...they aren't the cheapest, but by far the best as far as I am concerned and they work well with Windows.

by mjchekal

I tried your suggested path, it still tries to boot form the IDE device chain first. The only solution that I can come up with is to make that drive part of a data server on the network. I told them from the start that may be the way we go.

by dmiles

Yes primary partitions on disks on the IDE controller will receive DOS or Windows drive letters before letters for SCSI,if you have no disks on the IDE controller you can boot from a SCSI disk.
If SCSI hard disk to be the boot device,it must be ID 0

by mjchekal

I tried your suggested path, it still tries to boot form the IDE device chain first. The only solution that I can come up with is to make that drive part of a data server on the network. I told them from the start that may be the way we go.

by srisner

I believe if there are no "ACTIVE" partitions on the IDE, the SCSI device 0 may be allowed to be the boot device, depends on your system BIOS. A partition must be marked ACTIVE to be bootable. Create a primary partition on the IDE but DO NOT make it active and see if that gets by your boot problem.

by mjchekal

I have given up on this and will have this question closed. I tried to Low Level format the drive which removes an "ACTIVE" partition and it still tries to boot from the IDE even if the SCSI device is set active.

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