On Tue, 11 Jan 2005 01:06:06 +0100, "Folkert Rienstra"
But they do define what the enumerating sequence will be
and how the preferred sequence will be influenced by that.
Not with modern boards & BIOS's as boot order is so adjustable. It's
also typically a non-issue on ancient boards if there is a properly
installed boot manager or only 1 OS/active partition.
It's not that black and white.
The bootsequence option will have to support your "any" possible combination.
booting from any position is possible but if you have more than one
bootable device or partition you have to expect to give the computer
specific instruction on dealing with that - they aren't psychic.
reentering the BIOS setup to select a different primary device or
device order to correct a misconfiguration is not a *prohibition* to
booting to a disk other than primary/master.
It it is not supported you will have to reposition the drives
more like change the boot device order in BIOS or upgrade to a board
from at least the late '90's if you can't, or use a boot manager
either on a HDD, floppy, cd, etc. or change the master/slave selection
with an external switch...
repositioning drives is just clumsy & unnecessary unless you are
concerned with cosmetics & convention.
or exclude one/some from BIOS
inclusion or deactivate bootsectors until the preferred
sequence matches that of your choice.
conflicts with other installed OS's or boot managers or bootable
devices or mistakenly making partitions you don't want to boot from
active are all very different ideas than the standard ability to boot
to a HDD in positions other than primary/master. These conflicts you
mention are due to misconfiguration. Describing a troubleshooting
process to correct a misconfiguration doesn't change that or indict
the feature.
BBS BIOS's & BIOS's with BBS-like features allow you to manipulate the
preferred order allowing a great deal of flexibility & control over
the boot order allowing you to easily boot any compatible device the
BIOS recognizes. But even ancient machines should also allow booting
to at least ATA drives 0-3 as well as some mass storage cards. It
goes without saying that you have to expect to have to be careful when
adding many bootable devices & partitions to the same machine.
I have yet to see a mobo that could not boot from drive positions 1-3.
If you use boards which can't perform this basic, standard function
let us know what makes/models so we can avoid such odd-ball crap.