HD Confusion

I have 18.9G Quantum LCT20 plus 7.85Gb Quantum LCT8 and 3.99 Seagate.

The OS is on 18.9G.

I wanted 18.9 on ATA 100 Promise Primary Controller as master and the others on the ATA100 Promise Secondary Controller as 7.85Gb Master, 3.99Gb Slave.

Because of positioning, the cable connecting the secondary to the two smaller drives is not quite long enough.

It was long enough to go from Promise ATA 100 primary so I did that and connected the 18.9Gb to the Promise secondary controller.

I didn't expect the system to boot as I had always been under the impression that the primary partition had to be on the first Hdd ?

Well to my surprise it booted fine.

In post it shows HD0 = 7.85, HD1 = 3.99 and HD2 = 18.9

Fdisk and XOSL both show HD1 as 18.9, HD2 = 7.85 and HD3 = 3.99

The disks are partitioned as follows:

18.9 = Pri 1Gb, Pri 2 Gb, Pri 2Gb Ext 13.9gb split into logical drives
7.85 = Ext 7.85 split into 2 logical drives
3.99 = Ext 3.99

Should this have worked or is it because I have XOSL installed ??

Yes, it should have worked because you have the boot parms on one disk, and that is what the system looks for at boot time. From there, the configuration will still look the same, although the drives letters will be changed at the boot time.
For example, you could have the boot drive show up as drive "G" and things still run normally. The only time you could run into problems is if you remove a drive from the mix, and then things could be interesting...

When trying to boot the system will first look for drives containing primary partitions since the active partition (to boot off) must be a primary one. In your case only the 18.9 drive has primary partition(s) - so the 18.9 GB drive will automatically be "found" first making this "HD0". It doesn't matter whether this drive isn't the "first" drive with respect to the detection phase during the initial boot process...what matters is the primary partition.

After locating the primary partitions and naming these (C, D, ect.) in the order they are found the system will then search for extended/logical partitions and names these in the same way in the order they are found. Since both drives (7.85 & 3.99 GB) are hooked up to the controller (master/slave) as you would have had them hooked up had they been on the secondary controller, the result will be the same (for these two drives) - relatively.

What will make a difference is the left-over 13.9 GB logical drives on the extended partition on the 18.9 Gb drive. Had this drive been hooked up to the primary controller these logical drives would have been detected first during the letter-assigment phase. As it is they will be detected last and thus be given letters further down the alphabet than logical drives on the two other HDDs.

It's true that DOS/FDISK won't allow you to define a partition other than the primary one on the first disk as "active", but if you swap the (physical) drives around after defining the "active" partition you can do that without any problem...and keep the active partition where it is.

XOSL, apparently, takes over the drive order found by the startup process.


So yes, this should have worked..like it did - and no, XOSL has nothing to do with it. :D

Quote:

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Originally posted by kallikru
Had this drive been hooked up to the primary controller these logical drives would have been detected first during the letter-assigment phase. As it is they will be detected last and thus be given letters further down the alphabet than logical drives on the two other HDDs.

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Thanks for the responses.

kallikru: interestingly enough the the logical drives on the 18.9Gb are detected first.

In fact if it wasn't for the list in the POST, you wouldn't know the two smaller drives are connected to the primary ATA controller.

Maybe because the primary partitions are on this drive it is defined as the first and even the extended bit is seen as being on the first HD.

In fact I believe you stated something to that effect in your first paragraph saying it would be HD0.

Quote:

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Originally posted by Nix


Thanks for the responses.

kallikru: interestingly enough the the logical drives on the 18.9Gb are detected first.

In fact if it wasn't for the list in the POST, you wouldn't know the two smaller drives are connected to the primary ATA controller.

Maybe because the primary partitions are on this drive it is defined as the first and even the extended bit is seen as being on the first HD.

In fact I believe you stated something to that effect in your first paragraph saying it would be HD0.

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Exactly...(but maybe not clearly said...but you got the point..) :D