How Can I Prevent Xp From Loading Hard Drive

[skyarea]

I use a second hard drive that I like to backup with Western Digital Software. To that I (in the past with Win 98) I would go to BIOS and turn on the second hard drive and backup, then turn off backup hard drive off again in BIOS. I would boot up and only have my MASTER hard drive in Windows environment.

With XP even though the BIOS setting for the backup drive is off, it still loads it in Windows.

How can I prevent that? Besides disconnecting power and IDE cable. Or using a removable drive cartridge.

Is there any tweak that I could do to prevent XP from overiding BIOS hard drive settings and only have the MASTER drive?

Thanks for any and all help

 

[Lonman]

You could hook it up to the secondary IDE channel and turn the channel off and on in bios. If you have other hardware on the same channel it will get turned off too.

 

[skyarea]

Yeah, thought of that. I even mentioned that in the above. But I am looking for a way without having open the computer tower and unhook everything everytime.

 

[Lonman]

You misunderstood my post. Enabling CHANNELS is a bios feature... you should have at least two IDE channels. You can hook up one drive, by itself, to the secondary channel as the master drive, and when you want it to disappear, you disable the entire channel in bios.

What your dinking around with now in your bios is the boot order.

 

[Electronic Punk]

If the HDD is on its own channel (ie no slave present) you could disable that in teh bios or even in device manager

 

[Shuflie]

How to prevent XP from seeing Hard drive

You can stop the operating system from seeing a harddrive/partition by going to administrative tools in the control panel and select computer management. From here select disk management and right click on the drive you want to hide then select change drive letter and path. You should now be looking at a screen showing the current letter associated with the drive, highlight the drive letter and click on remove. The drive should now be hidden during normal operation. To get it back to perform a backup just follow the same procedure and add a letter to the drive again. Hope this helps.

 

[XeoNoX]

EDIT your "BOOT.INI" file........make sure you know what you are doing.

 

[skyarea]

Boot.ini

What exactly needs to be done to the boot.ini?