"David B." wrote:
Everyone is forgetting something, irregardless of IDE or SATA,
newer BIOS's have the option to select which hard drive is the
first boot drive, no matter where it is on the cable or what it's
jumper is set to, this needs to be set correctly as well.


By checking the User's Manuals of the current PC offerrings
at Dell, it seems that the *older* BIOSes allow the user to set
the Hard Drive Boot Order. At last check (a month ago), I
found only 2 desktop PCs which allowed that, and all the rest
just allowed setting which HD was "enabled". My 8-year old
Dell desktop allowed setting the Hard Drive Boot Order (i.e.
allowed defining which HD was "rdisk(0)", "rdisk(1)", "rdisk(2)",
and "rdisk(3)", and it allows great flexibility in multi-booting and
cloning operations. But the new ones don't seem to be as flexible.
OTOH, being able to set which HDs are "enabled" would aid in
"hiding" the parent OS when starting up its clone for its first run.
The presence of the RAID option seemed to coincide with the
lack of Hard Drive Boot Order settability, and that may be due
to RAID rendering the Boot Order moot.

*TimDaniels*