I’m having some boot-up issues with my PC at work – upon loading windows, I get an error that says C:\windows\system32\riched20.dll is not a valid windows image.
This is a problem I’ll have to worry about later… at the same time (today) I need a couple of MS Access Databases on an old harddrive (call it drive b)that I’ve plugged in as the Primary Slave Drive.
In the BIOS, can I set the Primary Slave Drive (drive b) as the boot drive and run Windows on it that way? Or can I somehow just set drive b as the Primary Master and flip flop it with the original drive?
Or do I need to manually swap the way the drives are plugged in AND reconfigure the BIOS?
I guess it’ll all depend on your bios. If you can choose not only the device boot order (floopy -> cd-rom - > hard drive) but also the order in which the hard drives boot then it’ll work perfectly.
I have an Asus motherboard and if I hold F8 while booting I can choose dynamically which hard drive I want to boot from.
If you just want to boot from the old drive a few times, you can just change the BIOS boot order. It won’t change the master/slave relationship but that’s Ok because you can boot from a slave too.
If you want to make a long-term change, you will have to open the computer, switch the mast/slave jumpers on both drives, and switch the cable position. That will change the master/slave relatioship on the computer.
All of this assumes that you have a bootable copy of Windows on your old drive. You may have some driver issues too if the old drive has never booted this computer before.
Pardon me taking the chance to offer a differing opinon, but I understood that the master/slave jumper only tells the BIOS that there are two devices on the IDE controller in question. Occasionally the BOIS lets you choose to boot to HDD 1, 2 or such. IF not, FDISK (or similar program in later versions of windows) is what determines drive order for boot. Also, it should be noted that a second drive that contains only data will not be bootable without some sort of OS on it.