Re: [Thinkpad] Booting with HDD in ultra bay

David Reid wrote:
> Seasons Greetings to everyone,
>
> I have a spare hdd in use mounted in an adapter and currently installed in
> the ultra bay or ultra bay 2000 (the drive bay on the left side of the
> A30p).
>
> I looked in the bios but didn't seen anything initially that would allow me
> to do this... Can the option be set to prompt me if I wish to boot up on
> this second hard drive? The drive has Windows 98se installed on C btw and
> I'm running Windows 2000 on the primary hdd.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Dave

Hi Dave,

I don't think there is a BIOS option that would prompt you automatically
at each boot. There are definitely BIOS settings that let you choose
which drive to boot from, but you'd have to enter the BIOS and change
the setting each time you wanted to switch boot order.

There are two additional options for you though:

  1. You can press a key (F12) at boot time that should bring up a
'Temporary boot device selection list' (or something like that). My
A21p has this so I assume your A30p would too. This will present you
with a menu that you can choose from. The only downside of this is that
you have to catch the PC at the right moment during boot-up to press F12.

  2. You can alter the boot.ini of the Win2000 drive to have an entry
for the Win98 drive. Then, make the Win2000 drive the one that boots
all the time. Now Win2000 will present you with the boot menu at every
boot that allows you to choose which system to start. This is an OS
solution that has nothing to do with the ThinkPad BIOS other than the
one-time setup telling the TP to boot from the Win2000 drive. If you do
a Google/Yahoo search with keywords like "dual boot windows 2000
boot.ini" I think you'll find tutorials walking you through how to set
up the boot.ini file like this.

Hope this helps!

Later,
Rob
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Received on Wed Dec 1 16:56:13 2004