Swapable Boot Drives

[Jeffrey A. McCright]

Most modern system board BIOS's will allow you to configure the CMOS for
either a PNP (Plug-N-Play) OS or a Non-PNP OS. Prior to installing any OS on
the system, be sure to set this to a Non-PNP OS. Next set the IRQ levels of
your PCI slots so as to not conflict with your onboard serial ports,
Parallel ports, on-board Network adapters, video, etc... (this should force
any PCI devices inserted into those slots to the specified IRQ. Install your
first removable hard drive and install your PNP OS such as Windows
9x/2000/XP on this drive. Windows NT won't be a problem as it is not a truly
PNP OS, so you can install it after Linux and any other Non-PNP OS. Beware
that KUDZU now gives RedHat Linux 7 (And maybe other distros) the ability to
be a PNP OS. I recommend installing the PNP OS first to set any PNP devices
not set from the steps above, initially prior to installing Linux, etc...
This should help to alleviate the likelihood of your device configurations
changing between hard disk swaps.

Just my opinion (so please don't FLAME me). I hope this makes sense and
helps.

Thanks,

Jeff McCright

-----Original Message-----
From:	Robert Kennedy [mailto:erwin_k_r at yahoo.com]
Sent:	Thursday, October 25, 2001 9:11 PM
To:	kclug at kclug.org
Subject:	Swapable Boot Drives

Hi All,

Right now I'm running Red Hat 7 on a pretty generic
X86 machine. My daughter wants to run Windblows and
wouldn't know a bootloader option program if it bit
her. I'm also interested in running Amiga OS XL which
is two emulators, one Linux Based, one based on the
QNX kernal.

I've been thinking about using removable hard drives
for the different OS's. My son thinks there might be
problems with settings that get saved to static ram
associated with the BIOS. (I.E. conflicts between
Winslows and other OS's)

Can someone clear this up, or please point me at the
proper reference?

            Best,

		Bob Kennedy

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