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

[news.comcast.net]

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.

 

[Jerry]

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.

 

[CraigV\(fs\)]

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?

 

[Guest]

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

 

[news.comcast.net]

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?