Setup question: SATA drive (on controller card) with IDE on K7T mboard

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Last week: I installed a WD Raptor 75GB on a new SiI 3112 controller.
Motherboard is an older MSI K7T-Turbo-R KT133A. I installed XP-Pro (sp2
slipstream) on the drive- single partition, disk 0. I made the mistake of
spending 20+ hours loading all of my applications and settings on this new
drive.

Now: since I have some older 7200rpm IDE drives, I would like to add them
to store files/backups. But, when i hook them up, the BIOS makes the IDE
drive letter "C:" and the newer drive "D:". It tries to boot to the older
IDE drive, now.

Question: can I do use these older drives without reloading XP and starting
over? I assume I need an NTFS boot partition on my IDE drive (c:) that
holds NTLOADER/NTDETECT/BOOT.INI. This would point to a clean XP setup on
my D: SATA drive. Or, I just give up and have a single SATA drive until I
can afford another SATA drive (and throw away the IDE drives)....

Any advice would be appreciated.
 
My ABIT motherboard has a BIOS option that allows you to select the various
boot options; switching the SATA drive as a primary boot drive is one. Check
your motherboard manual.
 
Thanks, Jerry. The Award bios doesn't seem to have that option. The Mobo
has an onboard Raid controller, and the bios allows you to switch the

Basically, I just want to confirm that if my BIOS forces the IDE as C:,
there is nothing that can be done in the XP setup.

Can I work around this with a boot program like Partition Magic?
 
You Can restore the Drive letters as you like from the following
1. Control Panel > Administrative tools > Computer management > Disk
MAnagement
2. Right Click on the Old Drive And Choose Change Drive letter and Make it
any thing but C (Such like z:)
3.Right Click on the New Drive And Choose Change Drive letter and Make it C
For the Step 3 You may need to restart the PC

Rami
Damascus - Syria
 
Currently I have a complete setup (including OS and APPS) where everything
points to C:.

If I add the new drives, and my OS and APPS are now on the E: drive, will
that play Havoc on XP? Will it even load correctly?
 
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