T43 (not) booting from the ultrabay

[ohthinker]

My new-to-me used T43 arrived with a more or less functional but far from optimized installation of Windows XP. It has a COA, but no recovery partition or CDs. The video driver is wrong for my Intel video chipset, so my guess is that the vendor just dumped an image onto it without really checking.

I'm not an XP fan and don't plan to use it much. The plan is to at least try to triple-boot Ubuntu, Win98 (I know, I know, but I have old software that's happiest snuggled up to an MS OS with a 9 in its name), and Win2K.

However, since I wanted to fit a bigger disk anyway, I decided to hang on to the 40g Fujitsu disk that came in the machine with XP on it, and boot that disk from the ultrabay should I want to use XP.

And that's where the scheme gets dicey.

If I have no main drive in the machine, XP boots from the original drive in the Ultrabay just fine.

But as soon as the new-to-me used Hitachi 80g Travelstar drive is tucked into its snug internal home, XP says uh-uh.

I hit the go button, then F12 to load from the ultrabay IDE. After Mister T gets done with his 2010 gripe, XP starts to load -- then it hangs at its light blue Windows screen.

I don't really have anything real on the Hitachi main disk yet; I've just partitioned it. The primary partition is a 10g FAT32 bootable partition for Win98 and Win2K. The extended partition contains a 10g ext2 filesystem and a 1g swap filesystem for Linux, with the balance as a FAT32 chunk (I'll figure out what to do with that later). Maybe not the best scheme, but I'm new to this and I'm still learning. (I may be back later for some help with that -- or perhaps Thinkwiki would be a better source?)

I'm F-12-telling Mr T to boot from the ultrabay, so you'd think that he'd ignore the bootable partition on the main drive, just as he does when I boot from a CD. And you'd think XP would just ignore the filesystems it couldn't understand and mount the primary partition and FAT32 extended partitions as extra drives. You'd think. Or, rather, *I* would, which is probably the source of my problem.

As I said above, the machine will boot a live CD in the ultrabay CDRW just fine, ignoring a bootable hard disk in the main bay. So why won't it boot from a hard disk in the ultrabay under otherwise identical conditions? Or is this a case of Windows XP insisting on owning the machine?

Will I have to use Grub to hide all the partitions on the main drive if I want to boot from the Ultrabay? Or is there something else here I'm missing?

A million thanks for any suggestions you can offer!

[sjthinkpader]

Try F9 resetting BIOS to default values.

[ohthinker]

Thanks for the suggestion. Alas, that didn't help.

XP gets to the two-tone blue splash screen with the Windows XP logo just to the right of center, then all progress stops. Now and again the disk activity icon flashes briefly, but that's about all.

I recall reading in the IBM literature somewhere that they don't recommend frequent changes of the main disk. Presumably that's apt to make the connector unhappy. So for booting an alternate OS from an alternate disk, the ultrabay would seem to be the only realistic option. And in fact the machine DOES boot fine from the CDRW - but not from an IDE HD in an ultrabay caddy. I don't get it.

The F12 boot device list does include the ultrabay disk. So I have to think there's a way to make this work. What am I missing here?

Thanks!

[lifrancis]

Try pressing F1 when the machine starts, go into the setup and change the boot priority of the hard drives.

[ohthinker]

I may have found a clue.

When I tried lifrancis's suggestion XP complained that one of my drives needed to be "checked for consistency." That drive, it said, was C: XP said it was a FAT32 drive.

Interesting. The drive I'm trying to boot from has an NTFS file system.

It's the drive in the main HD bay - the one I *don't* want to boot from - that has a FAT32 filesystem.

It would appear that the T43 bios isn't moving the ultrabay HD into the primary drive position, but is still letting XP see the main bay drive as C:

Has anyone successfully done what I'm trying to do - that is, boot an alternate OS from a hard drive in the ultrabay? I've seen nothing that suggests it can't be done, but so far it just isn't working for me.

Thanks again to those who've been trying to help.

[ohthinker]

This gets even more interesting.

It appears that in the last attempt to boot XP from the ultrabay, something trashed the partitions and format on my main drive. (I did NOT allow XP to "check for consistency" as it asked to do.)

See above for the former partitions. Gparted now evaluates the main HD as a single damaged FAT32 partition.

This is not looking too encouraging.

[ohthinker]

Progress!

It seems that something also twisted the bits of the original HD with XP on it : it behaved exactly the same way when stuffed back into the main disk bay of the T43, and wouldn't get past the XP splash screen. So I restored the original as-received image to the original drive (Toshiba, not Fujitsu, sorry), tweaked the boot order as lifrancis suggested, put the original disk back in the ultrabay and the new disk in the main disk bay . Poof : now it boots XP from the ultrabay as expected. The original disk in the ultrabay is drive C, and the new disk's FAT32 partitions are drives D and E.

It appears (though I'm not sure) that the trick is to have something on the new main disk that Win XP can recognize. A partition with MSDOS or Win98 seems to be enough to make XP feel at home in the ultrabay.

Next step is to see if I can force-flash the new-to-me main drive (Hitachi Travelstar HTS721080G9AT00) to get rid of the 2010 error. Then we'll see if things hold up when I start trying to load real operating systems on the new main Hitachi drive.

Thanks to all for the help so far.

Oh, an unrelated matter. Is it normal for the bios setting for config->PCI to have all the positions (INTA - INTH) set to 11 rather than auto? That's how it defaulted on F9, but that seems rather odd.