how to set primary boot drive

Question

I have a D-4600 system with an IDE drive. Just added a SATA drive and now the system always wants to boot from the SATA drive. I can get a round the problem by hiting F12 to select the boot drive but wonder if someone know how to set the default boot drive to the IDE drive instead of the SATA drive. The Bios doesn't provide that option.
Thanks in advance for your help.

dmngo · Answer

Thanks for your quick response. That's a bummer!!! So my next question is what is the easiest way to clone the OS to the SATA drive and is there any gotcha I need to watch for

shesagordie · Answer

dmngo

Acronis True Image 9.0

http://www.acronis.com/

You can buy the retail version of Acronis 1279691SF True Image 9.0 Downloadable Software @ $29.99 from here

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E1681279691SF

Bev.

ejn63 · Answer

You can't, other than to transfer the operating system (by cloning) to the SATA drive.

If you install SATA and EIDE together, SATA must boot the system; there's no way around that other than to manually select the boot drive at each power-on.

ejn63 · Answer

If you want to keep everything as is, including the diagnostic and restore partitions, Acronis True Image or Ghost (version 9 and up) can both do the job.

After cloning, disconnect and disable the EIDE drive BEFORE you boot the system the first time. Once you have done this, you can reconnect the EIDE drive.

dmngo · Answer

Thanks for all your help. I know what to do next if I have to. I think I will live with the F12 work around for now, hopefully Dell will offer a Bios update to fix this problem soon.

Storage, Drives & Media

how to set primary boot drive

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