Windows

the Promise IDE RAID controller only allows RAID 0 and RAID 1. Mirroring and Striping. Windows 2000 had RAID 5 software RAID capabilities but again, RAID isn't setup for dual booting purposes rather for security by mirroring one drive to another or linking two drives together to form a Larger single drive.

If you are going to run a test bed system for User created programs and Windows compatibility, Dual booting is probably the best course to take. Either that or set up two computers.

I'm not aware of a BIOS that will allow you to hook up two drives to the IDE channels and only use one drive at a time [in essence disabling the drive in the BIOS]nor am I aware of a special Windows program that will allow you to do this. That's not to say it doesn't exist.

btw: although i have not in mind compairing the results of the two windows(winme and win2k) at the same time(i must just test winme one day and win2k the other day and so on) i have seen a german company offering a box which can-after a reboot- switch from one drive(system) to the other.

i will change the drives whenever i like. eighter by simply exchanging them(i have all my working computer opened) or inside the case with special drawer as you certainly know.

I know I've seen disk managers at tigerdirect which have front panels to allow you to boot from up to 3 different drives and it just leaves the others unpowered. I'm not sure how bios handles that. If your systems have usb or firewire ports, usb/firewire drives could be used for data handling between machines quite nicely. Just some other ideas for you.

how to partition your 20Gig drive? Simple enough to do. Create a C drive and D Drive make them active and bootable via Fdisk then install the operating systems on the seperate partitions. Ontrack should read the dual boot and provide you with the option to boot to the different O/S's. As far as physical structure of the partition, W2K should have a space of about 4 GB to work with [including ALL service packs, hotfixes, security updates and the like] W ME probably 2 GB [including all the updates available.] I would say that dividing it in half 10GB for W2K and 10 GB ME ought to do the trick. Leaves about 6 GB for W2K [enough free space for virtual memory and any programs you want to install] and about 8GB for W ME. Depending upon what your testing you can chose NTFS for W2K or use FAT32, for W ME it's FAT32 only.

Hi Michael,

You do not need to enable RAID to use the drives on the on-board extra controller.

You can use the full rated speed of the controller for the drives.

You need to check for W2K, but for Windows Me, you need to install Windows with the drive connected to the standard IDE controller, and then you can move the drive to the RAID controller, and install the driver.

I guess, that I would install Me on C:
Then, W2K on
Then, move both drives to the primary RAID controller.
You then set the BIOS to boot from either SCSI, or the on-board controller. (depends on the options they give you)

On a DUAL-Boot system, I would leave the virtual memory settings alone, and let Windows use the same drive as the OS is installed on.

Chas