I added an extra hard drive to my old PII system this evening and have a couple of questions. BTW, it's running W2K Adv. Server SP2.

The system already had two Seagate SCSI hard drives (two ST34501W) and a Plextor 32x SCSI CD-ROM drive driven off an Adaptec Ultra/Wide SCSI 2940UW card. Trying to save some dough 'cuz I'm unemployed, I added a 13 gig EIDE drive to the primary IDE controller. This is the only IDE device on the system.

Now, I was always under the impression that if you install an IDE drive on a SCSI system, the IDE drive becomes the boot drive. I guess it's treated as drive 0. This does not seem to be the case, as the first SCSI drive is still booting as drive 0, the second SCSI drive as drive 1, and the new IDE drive as drive 2.

Also, the first SCSI drive is C:, second is D:, SCSI CD-ROM drive is E:, and IDE drive is F:

Is there any way I can swap the drive letters for the CD-ROM and the IDE drive? I would like the IDE drive to be E: and the CD-ROM to be F:.

BTW, all drives are FAT32.

Any advice here?

Thanks,

mattja

You should just have to go into Computer Management and then Disk Management.  From there just right-click on the drive you want to change and select change drive letter and path.  Boom yer done.

Check your BIOS, if the Boot order has SCSI CARD (or device) listed before IDE HDD, change it. also, check the SCSI card BIOS, and see if the "bootable drive" setting can be changed.

No_Expert

CassidyGT, cool. Thanks. Man, I keep thinking in NT4 mode. I have to start playing around with Computer Management more. :)

No_Expert, I think I'm cool now. I had thought that the IDE drive would be forced to become the bootable drive, so I would have to reinstall Win2k and all my applications, but it's still booting from the first SCSI drive, which is really what I wanted. I guess the SCSI card saw to that.

Can someone explain to me how IDE and SCSI drives co-mingle in Windows? I can never get the straight story.

I usually make them mutually exclusive in machines. either IDE or SCSI HDD -- no "half-breeds". My only exception is my gaming system, I have multiple IDE HDDs, but I have a dual SCSI CD setup. a Plextor reader and Plextor burner... all burning disk-to-disk is done on the SCSI bus, and takes less processor interaction. I can actually do other things with the computer (IDE HDD) and not interfere with the burn cause it's all going on SCSI.

No_Expert

Me too, this is the first time I've used both SCSI and IDE hard drive interfaces on the same system. Usually I go for all SCSI (including CD-ROM) or all IDE. But quite a few people mix SCSI hard drives with IDE CD-ROMs, so it must be safe.

My CD-ROM burning machine is a 90 mHz P5 with 64 megs RAM. It has 2 fast/wide SCSI drives and an external 2X SCSI burner. I burn disk-to-disk on that machine too, but can only get away with burning 2 CD's at a time because the software leaks so much memory, the 3rd burn will fail with a buffer underrun. But the first two burns always work.

Anyway, I'm just trying to figure out what the deal is with mixing SCSI and IDE drives under Win 2k. I heard there can be problems, but so far it's working for me. If I do encounter problems, I'll just bite the bullet and fork $200 for an additional SCSI drive. Hell, the fast/wide cable will probably cost more than the drive!

Oh, how times have changed since 1989 when I bought a Conner 104 mb IDE drive for $600.

You shouldn't have any trouble.  Almost every single server on the market today mixes IDE and SCSI.  Most of the CDRoms these days are IDE in servers, HP, IBM , Compaq, to name a few.  All SCSI drives.  No worries.

Thanks FALARAK. I was under the impression that the IDE drive would have to be the boot disk, but this appears not to be the case.

Maybe it's that way in Win95/98/Me?

Note to self:
Next time read all post before posting

Depends on machine or BIOS.  I run Dell servers at work, most of them with SCSI drives.  I added an EIDE drive and it automatically became the boot drive.  I changed a parameter in the SCSI Utilities (you know the message.. Press CTRL-A to enter SCSI utilities) and was able to make the original SCSI the boot drive.  I only added the EIDE for storage space.


Edited to say that I just saw Troy's reply and should have taken Instant_Karma's advice!

Troy has it right on the money.  It's a function of the PC BIOS.  Typical AWARD BIOS's have a boot order setting, and the default will be SCSI,A,C or something like that.

On older machines, adding an IDE drive to a SCSI system would ALWAYS make the IDE the boot drive... unless you have a smart SCSI card that could disable BIOS/Boot functionality.  

On newer system boards, you can pick which you want to be the boot drive in the PC system BIOS.

Well, it's an Intel AL440LX board with an Adaptec AHA-2940UW SCSI card. This is 1999 technology.

Looking at the BIOS, the boot order is:

floopy
bootable cd-rom
hard drive
network boot

Within the hard drive list, it allows me to select the order in which hard drives are booted and is currently:

bootable add-in card (perhaps the scsi card)
scsi hard drive 0
scsi hard drive 1
eide hard drive

I didn't change anything, this is the default setting. So, it appears set up to boot first from SCSI hard drive 0, which is what I wanted since that's where the OS is located.

This is great. The old BIOSs didn't come close to allowing this level of flexibility.

Damn! I am so happy I didn't have to reinstall Win2k Server.

Thanks guys!

FWIW a "bootable add-in card" would typically be a network card with a boot PROM.

Check out the Remote Insight/Lights Out (RILO) cards on Compaq servers some time.  They get their own IP address and allow complete remote control of the machine, even hard power off/on.  The RILO card also has a boot PROM, to which you can download whatever kind of boot image you want (even a Linux boot disk) remotely.

Glad to hear you're up and running!