boot.ini order

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vani

Is there a way to find out the numbering of controllers and disks in
boot.ini, and how it relates to real hardware?
Which physical controller gets multi(0) and which gets multi(1) and so on?
 
vani said:
Is there a way to find out the numbering of controllers and disks in
boot.ini, and how it relates to real hardware?
Click to expand...

BOOT.INI is an ASCII text file thus can be easily
viewed or edited. (But it is usually attributed Hidden
to prevent your altering it by mistake.)
 
vani said:
Is there a way to find out the numbering of controllers and disks in
boot.ini, and how it relates to real hardware?
Which physical controller gets multi(0) and which gets multi(1) and so on?
Click to expand...

I have found that there is no fixed relationship between boot.ini
settings and physical devices. My motherboard has two HD
controllers, Intel Southbridge - SATA only, and JMicron -
SATA and PATA. Both controllers show up in boot.ini as
multi(0). The only thing that determines drives is rdisk( ).

The rdisk( ) depends on which disk is the designated boot disk.
If you have a dual boot with two HDs the disk you boot from is
rdisk(0) and the other is rdisk(1). If you swap boot disks in
the BIOS, the rdisk( ) settings also swap, so the previous rdisk(0)
becomes rdisk(1) and vice versa.

The only fixed setting seems to be partition( ), as that refers
to the internal partition structure of each disk individually.
 
WinObj v2.15
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896657.aspx

The enumeration depends on how the BIOS presents the hardware to
NTDETECT.COM when the computer is booted, for example, if you only have
SATA drives in your computer and later add an IDE drive NTDETECT.COM
will probably enumerate the IDE drive before the SATA drive and the SATA
drive may get a different ordinal.

BOOT.INI and ARC Path Naming Conventions and Usage
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/102873

Understanding the Boot.ini Naming Convention
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pr...serv/reskit/prork/prbd_std_ccef.mspx?mfr=true

John
 
If your BIOS only has PATA (Parallel ATA) controllers, the default
hard drive order (as reflected in boot.ini's rdisk() values) is:
Master IDE ch. 0,
Slave IDE ch. 0,
Master IDE ch. 1,
Slave IDE ch. 1.

In some BIOSes, this order can be rearranged, but the hard drive
at the top of the list will correspond to rdisk(0) in boot.ini, the rest
will follow as rdisk(1), rdisk(2), and rdisk(3). If there is no device
at one or more of the position, the next device in the hard drive
boot order will be selected as the boot drive. If your BIOS has the
ability to allow user control of this boot order, it can be used to,
in effect, to do multi-booting by selecting which hard drive has to
top priority and therefore will be the boot drive.

If the BIOS has only SATA controllers, the hard drive boot order
follows the no. of the controller to which the drive is connected.

If the BIOS has both PATA and SATA controllers, one or the
other type of controller can have precedence (you gotta experiment).

*TimDaniels*
 
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