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| Thread ID: 66049 | 2006-02-09 04:24:00 | How to identify the boot drive? | John H (8) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 428648 | 2006-02-09 04:24:00 | Another of my dumb questions. I have two hard drives in my PC; one Samsung and one Seagate. They are both 40Gb. The D: drive is purely for back up purposes, and it is nearly full, so I have bought a replacement and will do the swap on the weekend. Now the problem is this - how do I work out which is the boot drive and which is the back up? In My Computer, right clicking on each drive and selecting Properties/Hardware merely brings up the drives in alphabetical order whichever drive I am investigating. No help there. Same thing happens in Disk Management - no matching of the drive specs to the brand. Do I just take a punt and pull one, and then reboot? Presumably if it boots I got the right one; if it doesn't I didn't? Is it as scientific as that, or do you have some tricks I should learn? Thanks for any assistance. |
John H (8) | ||
| 428649 | 2006-02-09 04:40:00 | The C:\BOOT.INI file will actually show you. :D It's hidden, so you'll need to make it visible. Then look at the BIOS setup's IDE page and it will show which drive is where. The way in which the disks are identified in BOOT.INi will take a bit of interpreting, but I'm sure you'll cope. :D This is what it looks like: [boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW S [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect |
Graham L (2) | ||
| 428650 | 2006-02-09 04:40:00 | Right click drive, go properties, hardware, click a hard drive, go properties, volumes tab, then click populate, this should tell you what volumes are on that particular hard drive (c:, d: etc). At least I think so anyways. |
roddy_boy (4115) | ||
| 428651 | 2006-02-09 04:55:00 | Right click drive, go properties, hardware, click a hard drive, go properties, volumes tab, then click populate, this should tell you what volumes are on that particular hard drive (c:, d: etc). At least I think so anyways. That did it, thank you. When I did that it showed that the Samsung is the back up drive. Thanks a heap. John |
John H (8) | ||
| 428652 | 2006-02-09 04:57:00 | The C:\BOOT.INI file will actually show you. :D It's hidden, so you'll need to make it visible. Then look at the BIOS setup's IDE page and it will show which drive is where. The way in which the disks are identified in BOOT.INi will take a bit of interpreting, but I'm sure you'll cope. :D This is what it looks like: Thanks Graham, that sounds a go, but as you will see, the quick and dirty way suggested by roddy_boy solved the problem for me. Thanks again. |
John H (8) | ||
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