OT: A question for any of the IT type people

Sorry for the OT posting, but I know a fair few here are in IT, and you're such a nice friendly bunch that it didn't seem worthwhile looking on a computer-related newsgroup for the odd computer related question once in a blue moon. So.....

Does anyone make some sort of switching device that means one can remotely (by remotely I mean without taking the cover off) alter jumper settings on hard drives?

Basically some sort of series of plugs that would attach to all of the jumper pins on several devices, with a little control unit that could alter the jumper settings at the touch of a button.

What I'm trying to do is make it easy to have a PC with 2 hard disks in, where at the flick of a switch I can go from drive A=master and drive B=slave to drive A=slave and drive B=master, so that 2 different operating systems can be used at different times. And no I don't want to getting into different partitions/dual boot type scenarios, as one hard disk may well be moving to a different PC some time in the near future, so it's only a temporary measure.

Peter

Reply to
AstraVanMan
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Removable drive caddies. I use them to swap between XP and Linux.

Fraser

Reply to
Fraser Johnston

Oh yeah, definitely. In fact, that's a very good reason *not* to have a system like I'm describing - one flick of a switch and a drive could be potentially damaged.

Peter

Reply to
AstraVanMan

switchable jumpers oO make sure its off first.

Reply to
Theo

Just fit lots of different drives, (I have 12) and choose the one you want to boot from in the bios. I have a choice of 4 operating systems.

Reply to
Burgerman

depending on the uses of each OS, u could look into building a second computer, u can build a 800mhz PIII system for peanuts these days, i mean £40 all in

Reply to
Theo

Suppose that depends on how good the BIOS is, doesn't it? I'm currently using an old Dell XPS tower system (Pentium 3), and all it gives me as far as bootup options go is to select the boot sequence - as far as I can tell, it won't let me boot from a slave drive.

Peter

Reply to
AstraVanMan

LOL - funny you should mention that - as my system that's just fully died was a Pentium 3 733MHz - bought for £450 back in 2000, and I recently (a few months back) spent about £25 upgrading the RAM to 384MB, and in my estimation that was worth about £50. Thing is, I've got sort of permanently borrowed use of my Dad's PC at the moment as he can quite easily enough use his wife's much more modern laptop when he needs to, so his only got used when he wanted to check email or browse the web and she was playing Spider Solitaire on hers!

I'd be more inclined to get a cheap as chips second hand P3 unit if I wanted, but if I was to go to the effort of buying something else then I'd probably splash out £500-600 and get something half-decent.

Peter

Reply to
AstraVanMan

Reply to
SteveH

i'd be up for that, where are you? :)

Reply to
Theo

Ah. Then you should have bought a better motherboard! I use an (old now) AT7-MAX2 Abit and I can choose from any of the drives. Extremely useful.

Reply to
Burgerman

Set your sights a bit higher than that Steve - you don't wanna get lumbered with cheap s**te.

Peter

Reply to
AstraVanMan

Well it depends on what you are doing it for. It's a lot of bother to DIY so I'd suggest it is less work to just move the jumpers as necessary.

Reply to
Questions

Heh, definitely looks that way!

Cheers,

Peter

Reply to
AstraVanMan

Bloody hell theat would be cutting edge here, where the server is a twin celeron 500MHz thing.

Reply to
Steve Firth

You want cutting edge? I recently bought a few SCART leads to help link together this new fandangled teletext TV with 2 VCRs and an 8-bit Nintendo I recently bought off ebay.

Peter

Reply to
AstraVanMan

Truly we live in wonderful times Brother Peter.

Reply to
Steve Firth

Have you been drinking? ;)

Why not move the slave drive to the 2nd IDE channel then use the bios to turn off channel 1 when you want to boot from the 2nd HD? (Make the HD master to the CDs slave on IDE2 then both OSs should be able to use the CD drive)

Reply to
Depresion

No, but maybe I should a bit more!

Could work - only thing is, there are 2 CD drives - a CD-ROM and CD-RW, so it could get complicated. Mind you, I could set up the CD-ROM as slave on IDE1 and the CD-RW as slave on IDE2, so when XP's running (IDE1) everything would be available, and when 98's running (IDE2) it'd have the more useful of the two CD drives.

Hmm, could work quite well.

Cheers for that!

Peter

Reply to
AstraVanMan

Erm.. No.

Most newer systems allow you to choose which drive to boot off though.

Reply to
Tim S Kemp

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