make a hard drive not bootable?

test_tube_tony

i recently added a hard drive into my computer that was the main drive in an old system. for some reason the bios forgets my hard drive boot order on reboot, and it tries to boot the newly added drive and thus the wrong OS. is there some way to make the drive not bootable without deleting the partitions and data on it?

shwaip

iirc fdisk (linux, at least) lets you toggle bootable flags.

kryyst

I would suggest first figuring out why your bios is not accepting the boot order. Are all your bios settings getting reset or just the boot order you setup?

Also check to make sure that you have the drives setup correctly. I'll assume they are IDE drives, check to make sure that if you are using cable select they are on the ribbons in the right order. Even better, just move the master/slave jumpers on the drives to the right way. If you want to further make sure the drive isn't primary put it on to the second IDE channel.

If these are sata, again make sure they are in the right order on the board. Though it doesn't matter as much with sata because it's fully controllable in your bios. If you are mixing sata and ide hdd's together then again you have to specify in your bios the boot order. Usually there is a setting on how to treat sata drives in a mixed enviornment so make sure you have that setup correctly.

test_tube_tony

all the rest of the bios settings stick. its really weird. its just the hard drive boot order. its the 939dual-sata2 board so its a mix of a raid array, a sata2 drive, 2 eide drives, and an ide dvd burner. its supposed to be booting off the sata2 drive.

how do i use linux to toggle the bootable flag? can i do this with knoppix?

DJ_Evergreen

You can change the boot flag in Partition Magic, or any other partition software.