Need Rescue Floppy for Two Hard Drives

[greengoose1]

Hi All,

If I have two hard drives with identical software, they are labeled 0 and 1. Now if the first one goes out - becomes corrupted - whatever, I would like to be able to insert a floppy that will boot the second hard drive. It will see the second hard drive as 0 not 1 in effect.

How can this be done? Is it possible? Any ideas?

[onedaddycat]

GG1,

I’m guessing this is just a conversation starter, or I don't understand the question, because I’m betting you already know this answer, but since you asked here’s how I would handle your request, unless the floppy it's self is some sort of requirement.

What you want to accomplish is easiest done with a mirrored raid, it will in fact accomplish what you want automatically and even repair the mirror to fix the corruption in the bad disk (if possible) and run off the good disk.

Another way would be to use ghost (or similar program) to clone your hdd's so they truly are identical, (This would need to be updated whenever the system was changed) Then you could just change the boot sequence in your bios to boot IDE 1, 0 instead of 0,1.

Hope that helps.
-Craig

[cleaverb]

If you do this...you won't need to boot to a floppy.
set up the BIOS to boot to hard disk 0 (presumably C: ),
Then set the second boot device to hard disk 1. Since
I don't know your computer setup, I can't be more specific.

Not sure if that was necessary to be able to boot a floppy?
Then set the BIOS to have the floppy A: drive as the second
boot disk in BIOS.

[greengoose1]

This is not a conversation starter.

And I know alot about it that won't work. In this particular case, WIN98SE is setup on two hard drives. This is for a couple of people that do not know much about computers, and have a small business. If one fails, then all they have to do is shut down, insert the floppy, power up, and the other hard drive is now the active primary. Sort of like a manual switch. They do not even want to go into the BIOS.

JT Doom did alot on booting at one time but I do not think he tried this. I just don't want to miss something relatively easy to do.

The other possibility is to modify the MBR in some way.

Thanks for the input so far. It all helps when you are looking for something. And I sure do not have the answer yet.

[Leurgy]

I'd make a Dos boot disk and a batch file that would have a command to boot from D:\Windows\win.

D:
cd Windows
win

or something like that. Autoexec wpould have to refer to the Batch file.

Yes, no?

[Platypus]

Originally posted by Leurgy
I'd make a Dos boot disk and a batch file that would have a command to boot from D:\Windows\win.

D:
cd Windows
win

or something like that. Autoexec wpould have to refer to the Batch file.

Yes, no?

If the D: drive is an exact copy of the C: drive, all references would point to C: so if C: had problems due to corrupted or missing files, the purpose is defeated.

[greengoose1]

Hmmm. But C drive is 0 and D drive is 1 in the BIOS. That is a difference.

[cleaverb]

Okay, well, after thinking about this some, the few times I tried
having 2 hard disks with identical OS on them, the computer took
awhile for it to decide which one it 'wanted' to boot from. In fact,
it got even worse if the hard disks are the same model/size.
You know, what I would do is get a hard drive cage, that you
would be able to swap hard drives relatively fast. Costs around
$20 or less, installs into one of your 5 1/4" bays.Maybe get 2
of the cages, and have the spare in a drawer at the desk or
something. Nothing could be easier than that.(?)

[jmtjet]

Install a Trios switch between the drives. That would give them the option to boot to either drive.

[greengoose1]

The hard drive cages and Trios Switch are options. I know the Trios switch works very well. All you do there is shutdown, flip a switch, power up and you have it. And the hard drives are certainly isolated from each other.

In effect I want the floppy to be a "Trios Switch". But I would still like to get a floppy to work. Could help people I would think and not only this couple. They be older and not knowledgable about computers. And are pretty set in their ways from what I have heard.

I bet one thing, we will know more about this before the finish of this.

I suppose you could code, but not much space in the mbr.

[SuperSparks]

How about running a boot loader from a floppy? I've got a little voice in the back of my mind telling me that XOSL can be run from a floppy. It can be found here these days:

XOSL

[Philgo]

How about the Bootmagic rescue disk.

[Train]

Well, any program would have to be free. Just reading between the lines, as a guess. And nothing installed like a bootloader to confuse the folks.

And the boot floppy would have to be able to bootup the drive 1 if drive 0 is not working. And if drive 1 is a backup of drive 0 , this would be desirable.

I wonder if Jo.exe could be modified to do that. That is what gives you the option to boot to the floppy, cd, or hdd , etc when you reboot a full install Windows cd. If I remember right.

[greengoose1]

Will have to check out XOSL, but as I recall will not work on a floppy.

The Boot Magic rescue disk - been awhile since I used that. Will have to see whether it will change drives.

Heard of Jo.exe but have not worked with it yet or know what it does.

What I am thinking now is what if anything do any of these suggested apps work with the MBR. Why I say this is the MBR initially starts to work after a partition is chosen to boot up. If I wanted to change HDDs is this the area to do it?