Disabling a 2nd bootable hard drive in a nForce 2 Motherboard

[videobruce]

Details;
nForce2 motherboard (Abit NF7-S V2),
XP Pro w/ sp3 (but I doubt it matters),
IDE hard drives on the same bus,
Non RAID setuo,
SATA ports not used,2nd IDE channel has a Optical drive on it.

There is the entry in the Bios to set any of the four IDE devices to "None", but doing so has no affect upon the next boot in the Bios. The drives still show up in the boot screen, so I doubt it's a Windows issue.

I have two bootable drives (1st partition each), and want to isolate one or the other (only on occasion) for different reasons, but I would rather not go through the hassle of opening up the case and pulling th cable(s).

Anyone else have this issue?

[stroyal]

I still have one of those.
I have never thought of it before, but I think the BIOS setting would only take effect, if the BIOS is doing the booting.
When you use a boot loader, Windows is doing the booting.

Just an educated guess though.

[RicheemxX]

When you set it to "none" and go through the boot is the second drive actually there or is it just listed as an option to boot from? Unless you use seperate boot tables disabling the drive most likely won't remove it from the mbr so it would still show as an option but it would actually be disabled.

[videobruce]

I have never thought of it before, but I think the BIOS setting would only take effect, if the BIOS is doing the booting.
When you use a boot loader, Windows is doing the booting.

The Bios is doing the booting, unless I'm missing something here. Changing the boot order is no issue. Hiding/disabling the drive is.

When you set it to "none" and go through the boot is the second drive actually there

Yes, alive and well, showing in the Boot screen and within the Bios itself and of course in Windows.

The Bios is ignoring the "None" state setting of that drive that was set in the Bios. It sees the drive no matter what. I'm assuming it's some lame flaw in the Bios firmware (possible because of age) and hoped someone had a workaround.

[stroyal]

Can't say for sure the BIOS is doing the booting, it is not unheard of for the operating system to do it, or some of it..

When you set the BIOS to operating system aware (plug and play), or something like that, the operating system set up most of the devices.

Age should not be an issue, it probably always did that.
Another issue is they wont install to a SATA RAID with an IDE drive installed, no mater what you do in the BIOS.
You have to unplug the IDE drive, do the install, then reinstall the IDE drive.

Also you lose the secondary IDE slave when, using SATA.

[videobruce]

The board does have two SATA ports that I have never used. This use to be my board which I sold to someone else. I wanted the dual drive, dual boot option, but to solve issues of corruption of the 2nd bootable drive with the same O/S, I wanted the ability to 'hide' the other drive without the hassle of opening up a one piece cover (all three sides) and disconnecting a drive.

Ok, someone answer this, what is the "None" option for (for each of the four possible drives) if it doesn't seem to have any effect??

[stroyal]

When I set the IDE drive to none during the installation, which I want on the SATAs, XP still ignores the SATAs and tries to install on the IDE set to none.
Edit; As well as out of the boot order.

The only use for none is apparently, if there is no drive connected, the BIOS dose not waste 30 seconds, looking for it during the boot.


NF7S V2
Barton 2500@3000
2 gig
HD3850
Corsair 450

It has it's quirks, but I miss Abit (RIP)

[videobruce]

Then, that is mostly useless.

I miss Epox.

[RicheemxX]

It has to be a faulty bios, as I use to do this exact thing with a few of my older boards. For me it was always quick and easy, simply disable one drive or the other depending on which I wanted to boot from. I liked the option when testing out AV software, and or trying to actually infect a PC with malware. You don't want both drives active in case the virus spreads. By disabling the second drive you didn't have to worry about it.

[videobruce]

Or poorly written firmware.

Here are screen shots. Note the image labeled 'primary master'. Unless "None" means something else.