How to find out whether BIOS booted from floppy or C: or D:

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riteshkapahi
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Hi

I have a quick question to all the Gurus of BIOS
As we have the boot sequence so that BIOS can boot from A: or C: (Primary or secondary disk) etc.

Is there any way to find out whether BIOS actually did boot from Floppy drive or primary drive or secondary drive

I will sincerely appreciate your response
Thanx
Ritesh
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ruelnov
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From Drive A: Floppy Drice LED comes on for a while and you hear the typical grinding sound when the drive is accessed. You also see this on your screen: "Starting Windows 98", or "Starting Caldera DR-DOS", etc.

From Primary Master: Of course, you don't see above indications and you immediately see a splash screen displaying the Windows 98/ Windows XP logo, etc.

From Secondary Master: Same as above for Primary Master, provided you detached Primary Master and you attached as Secondary Master an HDD with OS installed in the bootable partition. There is no need to detach Primary Master if the Secondary Master contains a different OS, but if the two HDDs have same OS installed it's not easy to determine at system startup which drive actually booted.

If booting from CD-ROM Drive: You see this message "Boot from ATAPI-CDROM"... "Press any key to boot from CD-ROM", etc.
Ritchie
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I think he is more interested if there is a command that can be typed or similar that will actually report what drive the system booted from.

I know of nothing like that.

Also, it sounds like Ritesh is wanting to know this after the system is booted rather than making observations during boot time.
riteshkapahi
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I exactly need what Ritchie has pointed out

I need to find out in the software automatically, AFTER SYSTEM BOOT, which drive was chosen

Sincerely appreciate all the responses and time taken
Thanx
Ritesh
KachiWachi
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Is there a particular reason why you need to know this?

Usually, people don't keep a boot floppy, a bootable CD, and the HD boot all on the system at the same time...
riteshkapahi
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Hi KachiWachi

We have a modified version of the motherboard which uses primary compact flash as well as secondary compact flash card and any one of them can have the boot code.

Ofcourse the boot sequence is from primary first and then secondary.

We need the primary boot flash to also work in the secondary compact flash slot Which was not working before as there was some hardcoded information in the flash which was checked by firmware like Device0 or Device1 depending on which slot it booted from and take some further actions

We have found a work around for the same but we still feel that the logical workaround will be to check and see from where it actually booted from

Sincerely appreciate your response
Thanx
Ritesh
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