W540 - boot from second hard drive?

Morning,
I've recently got an ultrabay adapter and wanted to know if I could run two separate OSs, one from each hard disc.
Effectively, I would like to have one version of windows on the internal HDD for general day to day stuff and one as a programming environment and be able to select which to boot from at start up.
I know I could just use a VM, but some of this stuff (Siemens PCS7) can put quite a strain on the system and I'd rather not have that overhead.
Thanks,
Solved!
Go to Solution.

Hello.
To run a dual OS setup, you have to turn off Secure Boot and set your boot options to both UEFI and Legacy.
I run a dual boot setup Win8.1/Fedora on both my T440's and though it is possible to set it up with UEFI boot
I just skip that hassle and run both OS in legacy mode. If you're planning on dual-booting different Windows
editions, that even applies more.
Further info here: Dual Booting Windows 7 with Windows 8 Pre-Installed UEFI
In BIOS go to Security - Secure Boot - Set to Disabled.
Then go to Startup - Set UEFI/Legacy Boot to Both.
A little further down, set Boot device list F12 Option to Enabled and then you can press F12 during Post
to select which drive to boot from.
Cheers!
ThinkPad W540 (20BG) - i7-4800MQ/24GB // ThinkPad T440s (20AQ) - i7-4600U/12GB
ThinkPad T440p (20AW) - i7-4800MQ/16GB // ThinkPad Helix (3698-6EU) - i5-3337U/4GB
ThinkPad W520 (4282-W4Q) - i7-2720QM/32GB // ThinkPad T400 (2767-W1C) - P9500/8GB
ThinkPad T61 (7665-CTO) - T7700/4GB // ThinkPad T60p (8741-C2G) - T7400/4GB

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Can't Boot from Second Hard Drive

I put a second SSD hard drive into the bay for a second hard drive but I'm unable to boot from it even after making it the primary drive in the computer settings.
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Any ideas?

Do you have an Intel version of OS X installed on the external drive and did you partition the external drive using the GUID partition scheme? If not then that's your problem. Also, depending upon which model MBP you have you may require a later version of OS X. According to my information the C2D 17" MBP requires at least 10.4.8 (the build that came on the OS X Installer discs that came with the computer.) 10.4.6 will not boot that model.

Booting from second hard drive

I have a T510 (4349-2PU) on which I would like to install a second hard drive using the ultrabay adapter. The primary purpose of this would be to run an alternative OS. I wonder if someone could please confirm whether or not this is likely to work, and if I would need to make any changes to the Bios settings? Also, would it matter which drive has the boot manager installed?
Thanks for any advice.

they would both need boot manager installed you would need to set the one you want to boot to first in the BIOs if you want the ultrabay HDD to boot it has to be listed first in the boot order
correction: from andyp Install the OS on the "second" drive with it in the primary slot - swap it to the bay, insert the original drive as primary and use the F12 function at boot. No need for a boot manager - easy peasy.
Thinkpad R61 7733-1GU
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How to boot from second hard drive in Ultra Bay

Hi all!
I recently installed a SSD drive as my primary disk and mounted my old hard drive in the Ultrabay. It still has all its original partitions, which are:
Windows "System Drive"
Windows OS
Ubuntu
Windows Programs
General Data
I can access 1., 2., and 5. from within my new Win7 install on the SSD.
My SSD drive is fully encrypted with TrueCrypt.
Is there any way I can boot from the HDD in the Ultrabay? I still want to access some of the old data on the system drive.
Ideally, there would also be a way to keep the Ubuntu partition and boot it when required. Any chance of making that happen?
TIA
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Hit F12 to pull up the boot menu when you turn the machine on. Select the drive in the Ultrabay. Beware that the drive you boot off of will become the C: drive until you boot off the other drive again. One thing you should do if you haven't already done it is put the stock drive back in the main drive bay, boot into Windows, and burn a recovery disc set. You may need this in the future and it is a good thing to have should you decide to sell the system later since you sill be able to restore it to factory condidtion.
If you just need to access the other partiton all you need to do is right click Computer in Windows Explorer, select Manage, click Disk Management, and assign the partition a drive letter. I would recommend just burning the recovery disc set and wiping out the stock drive so that you can use it for storage.

Boot from second hard drive with ZFS in Solaris 10 x86

Hi,
The usual menu.lst to boot Solaris10 x86 with a boot environment that contains a ZFS boot loader is this one
title Solaris 10 5/08 s10x_nbu6wos_nightly X86
findroot (pool_rpool,0,a)
kernel$ /platform/i86pc/multiboot -B $ZFS-BOOTFS
module /platform/i86pc/boot_archive
title Solaris failsafe
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But my question is : Is there a way to boot from my alternate hard disk by adding a new entry in menu.lst or is the only
way is to modify the BIOS parameter?
Thanks for your help,
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Groucho_fr wrote:
Thanks for your answer Alan,
But ok, I imagineI can add a grub entry. But what I want to know is what is the exact way to boot from an alternate hard disk on Solaris 10u6
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Personally I put all OS's on the primary disks if possible to avoid these situations and if I have others to play with then you can easily mount them in or set them up as D: drive etc...
The only exception would be in an enterprise setting where you need to do things such as mirroring but then again in those situations it's only one OS per machine anyways so it's much easier.
So at the end, I am not sure what I have to configure and what is the procedure to boot from my alternate boot diskTry the grub homepage for the grub manual and hopefully for a mailing list or try a search engine.
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-5461/zfsboot-1?a=view
has an example to follow of using -B.
And moreover, the installgrub does not working for me :
root@mac1 # zpool status
pool: rpool
state: ONLINE
scrub: resilver completed after 0h2m with 0 errors on Thu Mar 26 10:56:24 2009
config:
NAME          STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
rpool         ONLINE       0     0     0
mirror      ONLINE       0     0     0
c5t0d0s0 ONLINE       0     0     0
c5t4d0s0 ONLINE       0     0     0
errors: No known data errors
root@mac1 # installgrub /boot/grub/stage1 /boot/grub/stage2 /dev/rdsk/c5t4d0s0
cannot open/stat device /dev/rdsk/c5t4d0s2
You shouldn't need to do an installgrub if you installed Solaris. Try c5t4d0s0 not s2.
alan

Set Bios to Boot from 2nd Hard Drive

Hello HP forum!
I have a situation that I am afraid may be hardware related, so this is my last attempt for help before I let it go.
In this laptop, I have two hard drive slots with two hard drives. The second hard drive was used as an HP backup/restore drive as shipped from the factory.
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In my 1st Drive's Windows 7, I can read the contents of the 2nd disk, so it is definitely functional. Also, replacing the 1st drive with the 2nd drive, I can successfully boot from it, so it is bootable. This seems to imply that my hardware understands that there are two drives, but the BIOS does not recognize that port to be a bootable option, but only a storage option... I guess?
My question is, then, how can I set up my computer to give me the option to boot from either drive? Is it even possible on this hardware?
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Rex

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I am a Volunteer to help others on here-not a HP employee.
Replies aren't online 24/7 because of Time Zone differences.
Remember in this Day and Age of Computing the Internet is Knowledge at your fingertips if you choose understand it. -2015-

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I have a new 27in Intel i5 dual core 3.6GHz iMac. It works wonderfully.
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I can select the external drive in System Preferences/Startup Disk to boot from, but when booting the iMac gets as far as the white screen then just stops loading.
I have tried both the USB connection and the Firewire connection (with a Firewire 800 to 400 cable).
I have run Disk Utility and repaired the disk and the preferences.
I have used Disk Warrior to rebuild the directory as well, but the iMac will not boot from the drive.
It does boot from the original DVD's and its own hard drive.
My old 24" iMac had no trouble booting from this hard drive or any of the others I have collected over the years, so I am reluctant to think it is the external drive. It is something to do with this particular processor Snow Leopard and external drives.

It sounds like something in the SuperDuper clone might not have copied well. To get the full answer on that I would check with Apple or SuperDuper to see if they support each other.
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HP Pavilion 500-210 QE Can't boot from any hard drive.

Good Evening. As you can see from the subject, my computer just can't boot from any hard drive that I put on it. I tried swapping the power supply, the SATA cable, resetting the BIOS, enabling legacy boot, changing from AHCI to IDE and RAID...
When I get to the BIOS setup, I can see the hard drive and its specifications, but it just won't boot or show up when I'm trying to install a new OS. I'm not an expert, but I think the problem might be in the motherboard SATA ports, but I'm not sure. Just to make sure, I did try another hard drive and it didn't work aswell.
I was also thinking about buying an external hard drive and instaling my OS on that, but I don't even know if that's possible and I would really like to have my computer working again.
Thank you for your attention!
This question was solved.
View Solution.

What is the installed operating system?
Did you make a recovery disk set?
Did you happen to make a Windows 8.1 startup disk or USB recovery thumbdrive?
Have you tested the hard disk?
Press the power button and then immediately tap the Esc key. In the Startup menu, choose F2 for Diagnostics. In the HP Basic System Diagnostics menu choose hard disk. Run the test and post the results here.
The issue you are facing has nothing to do with the SATA ports. It is a configuration issue. Your PC is a modern one and its BIOS (UEFI) is far more advanced than what you may have seen before.
If you want to install a different operating system then you will have to make a few changes in the BIOS configuration. Secure Boot is turned on by default for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. If you try installing a different OS without turning this off then your system won't boot up. You may be running into this if you are trying to install another operating system.
The image below is what will be seen in the BIOS of your PC in the security tab --> . In the secure boot configuration options do not clear the secure boot keys! Those keys are your operating system license activation keys.
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Booting from external hard drive on intel-based MacBook Pro

Good day everyone. I know similar questions were raised in this community, but I still have some questions.
I have MacBook Pro(late 2011) with OS X 10.7.5 and external hard drive with Ubuntu 13.04, from wich i can boot succefully on my PC. But MacBook Pro will not boot from my external drive, no matter which key/combination i use during restart.
After googling I found some answers to my initial question, how to boot from external hard drive
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1852633?start=0&tstart=0
http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/faq/macbook-pro-boot-from-exte rnal-firewire-or-usb-drive.html
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1948
As I understand I need to format my external hard drive into GUID partition type and this will be enough to be able to boot from it on my mac?
With this new partition type, will I be able to install ubuntu again on my external drive?
Does GUID partition type supports NTFS, ext4 and FAT32, linux swap?(I use ntfs for big files, ext4 as partition for ubuntu and fat32, because i use windows, linux and osx)
Will I be able to boot from my pc from my external drive with this new partition type?
What are downsides, if any, to GPT?
here is info on my e-drive

LowLuster wrote:
The only OS that will boot from an external drive is Mac OS X or maybe Linux. For OS X to be installed on any drive it need to be formatted Mac OS Extended and have GUID partition table.
As for Linux I'm not that familiar with it but again for a Mac to boot it need an EFI partition on the drive and I don't think that is possible with NTFS or FAT32 let alone the native Linux format.
Went to wiki to learn more on efi but found artice on uefi.
Operating system loaders are a class of the UEFI applications. As such, they are stored as files on a file system that can be accessed by the firmware, called EFI System partition (ESP). Supported file systems include FAT32, FAT16 and FAT12, and supported partition table scheme is GPT only. UEFI does not rely on a boot sector, although ESP provides space for it as part of the backwards compatibility.[26]
Here is FAQ on official uefi website.
Can UEFI Secure Boot be adopted and implemented by a variety of operating systems?
UEFI specifications are platform-independent, supporting multiple platforms and architectures. In addition, UEFI specifications are designed to promote cross-functionality, as well as to support broad adoption across multiple operating systems, including Windows as well as Linux-based operating systems. The specifications are robust and can potentially complement—or even advance—other distributions, such as Linux-based distributions.
And here is wiki article on GPT expaining OS support.
It is obvious both uefi and GPT are ok with Linux and file systems such as FAT32, ext4 and NTFS.
I guess there is no much difference(or is that the same thing?) between uefi and efi used in Macs.
In your answer to Stark Industries you said that mac can boot linux from external hard drive, well this is not the info i got of official website and it is still my question, because your answer is very inconclusive and your info is partially incorrect

Dual boot arch from second hard drive [SOLVED]

I have two sata hard drives connected. Hard drive 0 has my working updated version of arch.
I'm trying to boot off the second hard drive that has an older installation of arch. I have added this to my menu.lst of my first hard drive:
# (2) Arch Linux 2.6.31
title Arch Linux 2.6.31
root (hd1,0)
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/29523114-ab52-4a9b-b93f-e2da915c0dc1 ro vga=773
initrd /kernel26.img
I have also tried using /dev/sdb1 on the kernel line with the same results. The uuid is correct I am able to obtain that from /dev/disk/by-uuid/
this is definately where the vmlinuz26 file resides for that hard drive. I can mount it and see it.
But when I choose this option, it tries to boot but then I get:
kinit: init not found!
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
Pid: 1, comm: init not tainted 2.6.31-ARCH #1
What do I need to change? Do I need to add something to that initrd line? Thanks.
Last edited by kekules_dream (2010-01-10 21:43:31)

I had to change the uuid to that of the root partition on sdb (the second hard drive) even though I had a /boot partition on it (sdb1). It is now working.
# (2) Arch Linux 2.6.31
title Arch Linux 2.6.31
root (hd1,0)
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/4a5827bc-6ace-4d4d-9ba7-24586e365c8a ro vga=773
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Hard drive dead/Boot from external hard drive?

My hard drive failed and I need a new one. For the time being, I'd prefer not to open up my iMac and replace the internal hard drive. I have an external USB hard drive and I cannot install OSX onto this drive (strangely, it takes the first disc but not the second).
Is it possible to boot and run an iMac G5 from an external hard drive? If so, what is required for hardware and what steps need to be taken?
If not, what course of action would you recommend?

It is very easy to boot an iMac from an external drive, but the drive should be a Firewire drive. Get one, then get SuperDuper!, which will enable you to clone your data and system to it. You can then choose the external firewire as your boot drive and operate without any problems.
Apparently, there are ways to boot from a USB drive, but they are complicated and a firewire drive is very straightforward and fast.
Let us know how you make out,

Panther is installed but won't boot from iBook hard drive

Hello,
I made a similar post in the iBooks colors section of Discussions on this topic not quite knowing whether this was a hardware or software issue. I finally got Panther to install after using Disk Doctor to check for and fix errors on 9.2.2 (I would never use with OSX) and also rebuilt the directory while booted from an OS 9 CD and running Disk Warrior from a floppy and taking out the airport card. The Panther CD told me to restart the computer after installation. During the OSX start up from the hard drive I saw a gray screen and the dark gray Apple logo with the spinning gear then the computer crashed and a message appeared that I needed to restart the computer. After restart, the same sequence of events happened again. I have tried to restart from the OSX using the full retail CD used for intallation and the computer also crashes. I cannot start up from the Disk Warrior CD either. I have also tried make a Safe Mode start up and the iBook again crashed with the restart message appearing again. When I restart in OS 9 everything works perfectly, OS, airport and applications. I did have Jaguar installed on this iBook until five months ago, but incounterred issues with it and decided that more RAM would solve my problem. I then decided to initialize the hard drive and reinstall OSX after purchasing 256 RAM. The 256 stick of RAM was bought from ifixit.com and a guy there told me he thought that the logic board needed to be replaced. I explained to him that the computer works perfectly fine in the OS 9 mode, but he said that 0SX is more demanding and 9 can get by on less than perfect logic board. I also reinstalled the 128 MB RAM that was in the computer when Jaguar was running on it, but that didn't help either. I have scoured the iBook and Panther OSX sections of Discussions for any others having a similar problem, but not such luck.
I would appreciate any information or suggestion that you might have as to what may be causing this issue on my iBook.
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Greg
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Greg:
You have probably already tried this, but the first thing I would do is reset the PRAM.
1. Shut down the computer.
2. Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command, Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
3. Turn on the computer.
4. Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys. You must press this key combination before the gray screen appears.
5. Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
6. Release the keys.
Also, check out this Apple article Your Mac won't start up in OS X.
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cornelius
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is your hard drive connected as IDE0 - primary master? if not try doing so.

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W540 - boot from second hard drive?

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