Too old to crawl under the desk  

billman87 said:

Umm there is this really cool feture in the BIOS from the 90's it's called boot order. No need to disable drives.

That's not good enough. The e.g. Win8 installer will still plunk the bootmgr into the first active partition it finds and not on the HDD where I want it.

whs said:

billman87 said:

Umm there is this really cool feture in the BIOS from the 90's it's called boot order. No need to disable drives.

That's not good enough. The e.g. Win8 installer will still plunk the bootmgr into the first active partition it finds and not on the HDD where I want it.

Exactly.

I had a look into the BIOS. There seems to be a disabling function, but I am not sure whether that only applies for the boot sequence. The picture was taken from the boot tab.

Whenever I get the urge to set up a dual boot system I use something like this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817997036

It's not actually dual boot, really, just more like two completely independent systems. It does keep the alternative OS I'm playing with from messing up my main system, though. :)

billman87 said:

So changing boot priority does not change which is the first available drive, OK?
I must be operating under false pretenses.

It does, but in this case the setup procedure ignores boot priority and adds to any existing OS MBR. (ie Windows 7) It looks for the MBR on ALL detected drives.

WHS wishes to leave the existing MBR 'unmolested' by the W8 installation. With the existing OS drive disabled and unseen by the setup procedure, it will create it's own MBR etc.

All boot priority does is change which drive/device is looked at first for boot instructions.

perhaps you need some motivation to get under the desk wolfgang

boohbah said:

perhaps you need some motivation to get under the desk wolfgang

That is my current solution. But she is not happy either about the gymnastics.