<HTML><FONT FACE=arial,helvetica><HTML><FONT SIZE=2 PTSIZE=10>Greetings and thanks to all for welcoming me and tolerating the increase in the group's average age and its decrease in average intelligence and Linux ability<BR>
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Re Andrew's desire for speed and for seperate drives, I have had great benefits both re bootable operating system drives and back-up and generally shifting lots of MB about, from using caddies - but I am still on PATA, no SATA. There must be people on the internet who have tried SATA though.<BR>
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I too like the idea of seperate drives for seperate operating systems and have been facing up to hard drive technology stopping me from using caddies. But I thought you Linux people - we Linux people - were always booting to and from all sorts of things and places. Can't the loader thing be configured to ignore drives etc?<BR>
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Or - on one PC I have a normal IDE as the main boot drive. Second "drive" is a Promise PCI RAID card which pretends to be a SCSI card but has (in my case two) IDE drives connected to it. Using RAID 0 this gives a fast drive. I have also loaded W98 onto it and can boot to it by changing the boot sequence in the BIOS to SCSI, A, C. <BR>
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Andrew if you had a similar PCI RAID card setup or a (genuine) SCSI drive on a SCSI card (or off the motherboard if it has SCSI on it) your BIOS would surely allow you to change the boot sequence. <BR>
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If the BIOS would also allow you to disable the SCSI / card, or the IDE, so the relevant drives could sit there not recognised when you booted to the other O/S would this be a solution? Or <BR>
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I haven't looked lately but simple raid cards should not cost much now or do you have it on your motherboard?<BR>
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Advantage - files and images could be swapped depending on filesystem recognition. <BR>
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Disadvantages - the drives you had disabled the recognition of would be still be spinning and thus ageing, and using power and creating heat.<BR>
(On my system both drives are all part of the working boot, swap file, backup, day to day working)<BR>
And, possibly, using up a PCI slot. <BR>
And having to nip into the BIOS to make a change but this is quick once you get practiced at it. <BR>
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