Re: [Hampshire] Mixing SATA and IDE disks

> For this very reason, I've never been a fan of dual
> booting - e.g. multiple operating systems on the same physical disk
> located
> in different partitions. Apart from anything I've always felt I'd have
> no
> trouble accidentally screwing one partition up.

No, I don't follow you. You screw up a partition through incorrect
operations on it, not through booting it.

> With a BIOS that correctly
> handled which physical drive (of a potential handful) you can boot from,
> it
> would be much harder (though still not impossible) to wipe/alter a disk.

I can't see it making any difference whatsoever.

Once you OS is booted, you either screw up the filesystems you've already
mounted (which doesn't care about physical drives), you explicitly screw
up other partitions (which again doesn't care about physical drives), or
you operate normally (which ...)

Forcing boot from one drive only would just mean that putting in a
temporary MBR hack would become much harder; it wouldn't change the
standard boot procedure one bit.

> For example, my Windows machine has an IDE and SATA. Windows refuses
> point
> blank to let me boot from the faster larger SATA drive unless it's the
> only
> drive present. So I'm forced to either lose capacity or run from the IDE
> and leave the SATA for data.

That's just Windows being crap. It has nothing whatsoever to do with your
BIOS & which drives it forces you to boot from, unless you have a BIOS so
buggy that it can't boot from one or other. If that's the case, just
change your BIOS - it's too old and clunky. But somehow, I doubt that's
what you're seeing.

> Funnily enough, this saved me a few weeks
> back when I had a corrupt registry - but that's more a happy accident than
> anything else - as is often just the way Windows is IMHO.

By the time you're talking about registries, the BIOS boot sequence is
ancent history.

> Perhaps one day, disks and even partition management will be handled all
> by the BIOS.

God, I hope not.

The BIOS is there to provide primitive access to your devices before you
can get a proper OS in to do the job properly. By forcing everything
through the BIOS, you end up with a system where you can't replace
functionaltity at will; you'll be *forced* to use one particular type of
partition manager because that's all there is.

What we have now is generally about right. The two significant
improvements I'd like to see are :-

- an open BIOS (e.g. LinuxBIOS)
- fewer people blaming the BIOS for stuff that has nothing to do with it.

Vic.