Boot from a slave drive?

[Robert M]

Is it possible to use the fdisk program included with MS-DOS 6.2 to set a slave drive's primary partition to be the "Active" partition?

Suppose two drives were on the primary IDE channel, and someone needed to boot a different version of DOS from a slave drive.

When you select the slave as the fifth option in FDISK, can you set a primary partition with an OS "Active" that resides on the slave disk? Then, boot from the slave?

Why do I keep reading that you must boot from the master drive or that only the Master drive is used for booting the computer?

If you can boot from a Slave drive by setting a primary partition on it to be the "Active" partition with FDISK, what drive letter does the slave get? What drive letter would refer to the Master drive if you booted up using the slave?

[Train]

I used 2 hdds and just selected which hdd to boot to in the BIOS. Thusly selecting my OS.
Yes, with a boot manager, you can boot to multiple OS's on various partitons/hdds also.

Remember DOS does have some size limits.

[Robert M]

That really does not answer my question.
Anyone else know?
Can fdisk be used to make a primary partition with an OS installed on a disk jumpered to be a slave in a master/slave arrangment the "Active" partition?

Yes or no? Assume each drive is detected correctly in the BIOS and they are 100 MB drives and they each contain one primary partition.


If booting from the slave drive is possible after setting the partition on it it "Active" ....What drive letters get assigned?

[Train]

Yes, you can do that. Up to 4 primaries.
The OS assigns the letter

[SpywareDr]

(Click the image, or here, to go to kb255867)

[Robert M]

So.... you are saying that when you choose "Set Active Partition" that a choice for a slave drive's primary partition is offered?

[SpywareDr]

Select "5. Change current fixed disk drive" first.

[Robert M]

Thanks
I will just assume that after selecting 5 for the additional physical drive, the primary partition(s) are listed with the choice to set one Active available.

I wish I could see a screenshot of the set active choices after selecting 5....the disk jumpered as a slave disk...there are none on the internet that I can find.

[SpywareDr]

Google: fdisk "2. set active partition" "5. change current fixed disk drive"

[Robert M]

well, I searched on a few of links in the google results for a couple hours but still nothing good. One guy claims tha you can only set primary partitions active with fdisk on the first disk

[Train]

Well this for the various versions of MS DOS.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/69912

Note the tables as you scroll down.

[jdc2000]

It might also help if we knew what you were trying to accomplish with this. Multi-boot system, or something else?