Any easy way to select which OS to boot as default?

[Rainbow Man]

Right now I have Vista installed on 2 HDDs (raid) and XP Pro on another single harddrive. If the raid drives are connected to the system it seems the BIOS will boot from them. I see no setting to disable this on the BIOS setup screen.

I suppose I could hammer F12 or whatever's the command to show the boot menu, but that seems a little cumbersome to remember every time I start up the box.

I could also unplug the raid drives I suppose but that also feels like a rather primitive "solution".

On my old Amiga it was easy to do this. With the PC it feels like there's very little control over stuff like this.
Peace.

 

[Davros]

the boot menu is the easiest
whatever you do (bios menu or boot manager) your gonna be presented with a menu to choose the boot drive at some point - or do you expect the pc to guess

 

[Rainbow Man]

Well I did say select as default..

That precludes the need to guess!
Peace.

 

[Davros]

most boot managers have a time out function
ie if you dont select in a certain time they will boot the default drive
iirc xp's boot manager had this

does vista have a boot.ini (hidden by default)
in xp you change these 2 lines

timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS

 

[Humus]

does vista have a boot.ini

No, it's much more messy system now. Fortunately there are good tools for dealing with it. I've had great success with VistaBootPro.

 

[Davros]

does it work with other o/s's as well ?

 

[Humus]

Yeah, at least XP. Don't know about earlier OSes.