A question about Disk Director.

I found an old unused 30GB drive. I put it in the removable tray of my mobile rack (IDE), where I keep my Acronis back up images, and installed Ubuntu on it. It was a very smooth and fast install. I got on the internet, I checked email. I had it download and install 188 updates to the program. Very stable and fairly easy to use. Has a learning curve, but I think I could have been happy with it eventually.

What I didn't realize was that it would create a dual boot segment in the MBR of my SATA XP drive. So when I tried to put my backup drive in the removable tray, and boot into windows I just got an error that it couldn't find a certain file right after the POST. The only thing I could do was boot the XP install cd and use the Recovery Console to fix the MBR. So now I can boot XP normally and use my backup drive. But the Ubuntu drive will no longer boot.

Would Disk Director have the ability to enable my machine to boot into Windows even if the Ubuntu drive was not connected to my computer. I only have room for one mobile rack. So I use drives in different removable trays. I need to be able to boot Windows with the Acronis back up images in the tray, and then when I want to play with Ubuntu, replace the drive tray and boot Ubuntu. Could Disk Director make this possible?

~Dave

 

Dave49,

I assume you used fixmbr. Was there a Microsoft message (in the Recovery Console) telling you there was a MBR error immediately prior to using fixmbr?

 

No there wasn't. The dual boot worked fine as long as the Ubuntu disk was in the tray. But if I removed it to use my back up disk int the tray, the system wouldn't boot. It just hung on couldn't find GNU, or something like that. So I fixed the MBR to enable me to boot into Windows without the Ubuntu drive in the system.

~Dave

 

I was hoping the dual boot would just default to the OS present if the Ubuntu drive was not present. But it won't, so I ran fixmbr from the rc.

~Dave

 

Hi Dave,

I believe that BootIt NG would do this. They just released version 1.83 of BootIt NG.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootit-next-generation.htm

The reason I believe that BootIt NG would work, is because BootIt NG boots the Hard drives, not the operating systems, themselves.

Install BootIt Ng on the permanent Hard drive in your system.

One drawback is that Boot It NG will need to create a seperate FAT32 File System partition, if you don't have any. It installs the files on a FAT32 File System.

 

I'm particularly interested in the claims:

Boot any partition on any hard drive (via BIOS)
Not quite sure how this works, though.

Boot multiple operating systems from a single partition

I sure hope this is really true.

Thanks,

~Dave