Swapable Boot Drives

[Monty Harder]

>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?

  Does your BIOS have the option to auto-detect a drive at boot time?  If
so, there should be no trouble at all.  Even if not, you could probably get
away with setting it for the smallest of the drives, provided that they all
had the same head/sector dimensions, but a different number of cylinders,
and the bootable partition on each was no bigger than the number of
cylinders specified in the BIOS.  Once an OS gets loaded, it looks at such
things as the BIOS Parameter Table (or in the case of Linux, geometry parms
passed to the kernel via LILO can override whatever the kernel detects on
its own).