Booting off 2nd HD on Dell Studio 1745 Laptop
in [Dell]
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From: Timothy Daniels on 16 Jul 2010 02:52 Thanks for checking, Brian. Does BING work with Vista and Win7? (I have Vista on the laptop.) Do you suppose that BING is *required* for Windows to boot from external SATA HDs, so that just Windows' own boot manager wouldn't work in booting from external SATA HDs? *TimDaniels* "Brian K" wrote: > Tim, > > I'm a fast worker. I just ran this exercise to confirm my memory isn't faulty. > > My external HD is 320 GB (eSATA). I resized the partition to 305 GB so that I had 15 GB of unallocated free space. I > restored my WinXP image into this space. A Boot Item was setup in BING with the Swap option enabled as the OS wasn't > on HD0. WinXP booted from the eSATA HD. > > Easy. I have a whole series of backup images that I can use for tests. At present I have over 20 bootable OS on HD0. > Several WinXP, several Win7, several Linux, several DOS, etc. All independent, courtesy of BING. >
From: Brian K on 16 Jul 2010 07:06 Tim, BING works fine with Vista and Win7. I don't use Window's boot manager so I can't answer whether it can boot an OS on an eSATA HD. I'll bet BING could boot an OS on a HD connected to your Expresscard. Try this. Boot from a BING CD. If you can see your eSATA HD in Partition Work then BING will be able to boot an OS on that HD.
From: Brian K on 16 Jul 2010 22:24 Tim, Off topic but TeraByte Unlimited have a script that lets you boot WinXP from a USB external HD or a USB flash drive. http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/tbosdt.htm?pt_sid=081d42cf71b0b651adeacf7543286703 See Additional Items in that page.
From: Timothy Daniels on 17 Jul 2010 02:24 Interesting... Does BING reside on the PC's internal HD or on the eSATA external HD where the OS to be booted resides? As I have vaguely been able to understand from reading the NGs, the problem with booting from an external HD is that the driver to enable communication with the external HD lies in is in the part of the OS that must be loaded after booting the OS. IOW, it's the old ChickenAndEgg problem. If BING resides on the internal HD and if BING contains the eSATA driver to communicate with the external HD, I can see how booting the OS from the external HD might succeed. In effect, the BIOS just boots BING, and BING then acts as a BIOS to start the booting of the external OS. *TimDaniels* "Brian K" wrote: > > BING works fine with Vista and Win7. I don't use Window's boot manager so I can't answer whether it can boot an OS on > an eSATA HD. I'll bet BING could boot an OS on a HD connected to your Expresscard. Try this. Boot from a BING CD. If > you can see your eSATA HD in Partition Work then BING will be able to boot an OS on that HD.
From: Brian K on 17 Jul 2010 03:04
BING installs into an 8 MB primary partition, usually on HD0. It makes use of the Extended MBR, LBA-1 and beyond as well as the MBR, LBA-0. It contains no drivers. It doesn't care if you have 1 or 8 HDs. BING can boot an OS on any HD. During the boot process it "Swaps" the HD so that it appears as HD0 to the BIOS. Each OS has a Boot Item in BING where the intended MBR on boot is recorded. So dynamically the MBR is changed for each OS booted. This enables a BING controlled HD to have up to 200 primary partitions. But only 4 of these primary partitions are in the MBR at any one time. The remaining partition data is stored in the Extended MBR. With BING you can hide OS from each other so there can be no cross talk. Unlike the Microsoft boot loader, BING doesn't require shared booting files on HD0. The OS are independent. So you can remove an OS without affecting the others. |