China DOS Union

Early operating systems could only boot from the C drive, floppy disk, or CD-ROM. Gradually, motherboards came to support more and more boot devices. For example, in the BIOS you often see things like HDD-1, LAN, and so on.
Normally, LAN is used for diskless booting, and USB is used for USB flash drives.
But what are HDD-1, HDD-2, etc. used for?

I tried installing a boot system on the D drive, then set it as HDD-1 in the BIOS, but it actually said it couldn't find the hard disk. Does that mean HDD-1 means booting from the second hard disk?

If that's the case, then how can booting from the D drive be done?
I'm a network admin at an internet café, and mainly I just want to save myself some trouble. The boot system on the C drive in the café machines often gets damaged. Even if I've used Ghost for backup, I still have to remove the CD-ROM drive to boot. If I could boot directly from the D drive when the C drive crashes, that would save a lot of worry and effort.

A dumb question — if you know, please answer!



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With difficulty I brandish the long halberd, for all ages relying on a single man

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If nobody answers then forget it。。。。 but why is everyone so dismissive?
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The HDD-1 seen by the BIOS indicates the numbering of the connected hard disks. It might be the first hard disk (shown in the BIOS as HDD-1; HDD-2...), or it might be the second hard disk (shown in the BIOS as HDD-0; HDD-1...). It is definitely not the D partition you mentioned.

In other words, whether you boot from the C partition or the D partition has nothing to do with the BIOS, so you shouldn't be changing the BIOS for that.

Then if I want to boot from the D partition, what should I do?

As far as I know, that shouldn't be possible!

The following is quoted from cn_archer at 2003-7-26 17:41:10:
Then if I want to boot from the D partition, what should I do?

That is beyond what the BIOS can do. Try a multi-system manager like SPFDISK instead (that is, a software method); that should make it possible.

I once saw settings like C only or D\C\CD-ROM in the BIOS boot options on some motherboards.
They were all Award BIOS, so the differences shouldn't be that big.。。。。。。

I seem to have seen something about it online before, but at that time I was still rather dumb... so I didn't pay attention...
Sigh!

How dumb! Ms. network admin, just back up the GHOST image file on the D drive, boot from the A drive, and restore the image from the D drive back over there, and that solves it. Then you won't have to mess with the CD-ROM drive to boot!

Hehe, in the end that still means opening up the case, so how is that any different from removing the CD-ROM drive to boot?。。。。
I just want to be lazy — ideally I could just change something in the BIOS and get into the system directly. After that, whether I restore a GHOST image or reinstall doesn't matter.