Überhacker II, Chapter 3: How to Get Many Operating Systems on
One PC, continued ... IDE hard drives are the ones that usually
come with PCs. SCSI drives are faster, and you can place many
more SCSI drives on one PC. The disadvantage is that SCSI drives
cost more and, in order to run them, you usually have to add a
SCSI card and cables to your PC. Also, today most BIOSes only
offer the choice of one generic boot from a SCSI drive, yet
allow you to specify any IDE drive. This chapter will assume IDE
drives for booting operating The disadvantage of IDE drives is
that you can have no more than two IDE busses (the cables that
connect drives to the motherboard) and each IDE bus can have no
more than two drives. This includes the total of hard and CD or
DVD drives. If you are using old hard drives, be careful. They
have a tendency to crash when it is most inconvenient, and take
a lot of work to make halfway safe to use. One problem is that
it could have an infected master boot record. Some of these boot
sector viru