Question about booting from a second hard drive

I recently installed a second hard drive into a Dell Dimension 8200 and cloned my old drive to it. How do I know which hard drive my computer boots up from?

 

If you have both HD on the same IDE cable it will always boot from the HD on the end of the cable which is the Master position.

You can also see which partition is labeled as "system" or "boot" in Disk Management. Start>Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Disk Management.

 

Also, if you are comfortable with using the BIOS, you might be able to change boot order there, regardless of the HDD's position on the IDE cable.

 

In disk management, the old drive is listed as 'system', but I didn't see anything labeled 'boot. When I use the computer, I see the F drive in a separate folder in my computer (I believe that is the new drive). However, when I save something to my desktop, it saves to the F drive. Everything else on there is saved to the C drive. I read on another site something about a 'dual-boot'- could this be happening here?

 

And in BIOS, only one of the hard drives is listed in the boot sequence.

 

If Disk Management shows the old drive as system then that is the drive you are booting from.

Speculant said that some systems may allow you to choose to boot from the slave drive but from what I remember IDE drives only booted from the Master position. I never had a system that gave a choice. If only one HD is listed in the boot sequence then I am fairly sure that it is attached to the end of the IDE cable. Since your BIOS doesn't give you a choice whichever drive you attach to the end of the cable will be the one you boot from.

I don't know what is going on with saving to your desktop. If you save a file to your desktop where on drive F: is it showing? (If I am misreading which drive you are running from then it would be saving to F:\Documents and Settings\yourusername\Desktop but it sounds like it is just going into the F: folder not into any sub-folders.)

 

Actually, I was wrong. The new drive (f) is listed as system and the old one (c) is listed as page file. The file path of the program I was referring to is F\Documents and Settings\username\Desktop\Start.exe and it is on the desktop of whichever drive I am using. So is it safe to assume I am booting from the new drive?

 

Although that still doesn't explain why the C drive is listed in the BIOS boot sequence...

 

I don't have XP loaded on a machine right now so I can't verify what flags (boot, system etc.) are put on the drives in XP.

I'm 99% sure that Disk Management will only show one partition as "system" as I believe that designation means the partition from which Windows is running. So if it says F: is "system" then that is what you are booting.

I'm sorry I can't be more definitive. Perhaps, you could change the wallpaper on the current desktop. Then unplug the new drive and boot to the old one. If the wallpaper is your old one then you know for sure that you were booting from the new drive. Keeping different wallpapers on each desktop may be an easy way to keep track of where you are.

 

That is a really good idea- I will do that! And thank you to both you and Speculant for your help.