On Tue, 19 Dec 1995, Erik Bertelsen wrote:

> > Lest we not forget how a mac boots - floppy1, then floppy2, then SCSI
> > devices.  Starts at the HIGHEST bus, HIGHEST ID, and works down until it
> > finds a bootable disk - if the startup disk isn't set, well then, it would
> > do just this.  If you make sure that the disk you wanna boot is the highest
> > SCSI # on the chain, it'll boot there.
> > 
> Not quite.
> 
> If there is no bootable floppy disks, it boots from the hard disk.
> But not necessarily from the disk with the highest id, in fact normally 
> you boot the internal disk, i.e. SCSI id 0 even if there are external 
> disks with higher SCSI id's.
> 
> This may however be changed by using the "Startup disk" control panel to
> select another default boot disk. In fact this gives the Macintosh user
> a choice of boot device that the PC user does not have.
> 
> If the selected hard disk is not present or if it is not bootable, then
> the SCSI bus is searched for another bootable disk.

Correct.

> Add to this that in the case of partitioned disks, I think that the Mac
> selects the boot partition by taking the first according to a 
> lexicographic sorting of their names.

Correct.  It took me about three days to figure this one out, since I 
had so many partitions.  But I finally gave up and installed system 7.5 
and redid all my partitions, accidentally losing a bunch of information 
in the process.  I hate macs...  ;(

--Rick C. Petty,  aka Snoopy
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