I have scanned many topics, but haven't seen any with this scenario. I have recently installed Vista32 on my sole IDE drive. I have 4 SATA drives, one with XP-Pro installed on drive letter"D"(logical drive) with drive letter "C" left intentionally empty (I had read that doing this is a prevention from hackers). I don't have any problems with either OS, nor any problems booting to either if I use the BIOS boot menu. If I choose the IDE drive, I go directly to Vista (which I am falling in love with). When I choose my SATA drive I am presented with the boot menu "Windows Vista" followed by "Windows XP Professional". When I choose XP, no problem but if I select Vista I am presented with the usual black screen error telling me that it cannot find a valid windows installation.
I realize my configuration is rather off the wall, but I've learned to live it. Yet, it would be nice to not have to deal with pressing so many keys to get to my intended destination. Any suggestions? Mahalo.

Aloha to all!

Hi and welcome to PROnetworks! Your situation, as you've stated is a bit unorthodox, but not out of the realm of what we might see, as most MOBO's with SATA still have IDE connectors, so the possibility of seeing that type of setup looms larger.

An important thing to note on any system of this type is not only what drive WINDOWS sees as the SYSTEM drive (In Disk Mgmt), but also in the BIOS as to which drive(s) are set to boot first.

Best case scenario is to have the IDE drive as the System drive as the one that has XP (Installed BEFORE Vista), then any additional Vista OS's can be installed to either the IDE (Space permitting) or installed to the SATA drive(s), keeping in mind that the IDE should be set to boot first in this situation.

Thanks for the reply, Kevin. Yes, my setup is a mess, but.. it works! I am not afraid to try new ideas, but I have to pause and think about it when I weigh the importance of the goal. In this case, is it really that important to me the have the traditional menu, or should I continue to use the BIOS boot drive selection method (which I know works)? It becomes scary when one makes a change to boot settings and click RESTART and is presented with an error message preventing the system to proceed. Thank goodness booting from the VISTA install DVD and choosing REPAIR fixes the problem allowing you to get back into VISTA. I spent quite a few hours with doing just that last evening and finally got things back to the original setup I had.

Your description of the "best case" sounds like a winner, but I don't feel like moving my XP install from the SATA to IDE and all the other things that would follow just to get rid of one annoyance. I figured it would be nice if your wonderful software could rescue me from my poor planning, but it doesn't appear that it can.

Thank you for your ideas and your effort!

-Larry from the island of Kauai