I want to have a 2nd internal ide hard drive in my machine, so rather than having it as a slave.. have it as a 2nd master drive. Then somehow select which hard drive to boot into, so i can have winxp on one and linux on the other. Is this possible? I realise i can have a seperate usb drive and boot into it via a change in the bios, i was just wondering if there was a way of moving the drive inside the machine as an internal ide drive. Secondly, is there a tool that i can install that will allow me to select which drive to boot into, so when i switch the machine on it will give me options of "1. IDE 2. USB" so i dont have to keep going into my bios. TIA.

If you already have windows installed and install Linux onto the secondary drive, linux has it's own bootloaders (grub/lilo) which will allow you to choose which OS to boot to. You don't necessarily have to make it master on your second IDE controller. It could be slave on the first IDE.

In the BIOS disable the entry for the hard drive, and change boot priority to look for IDE0 then IDE1 etcetc.............

Thanks Curt, do i need to specifically add WINXP to the list of OS's in the boootloader? If so can you point me to a site with a noddy's guide... Thanks

Fortunately, this is fairly easy... Linux on one drive and XP on the other should work fine, GRUB should find XP and hand it over as an option. The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.-Nathaniel Borenst