Sorry for the confusion, I have a lot going on in my house when I was writing this. My wife is sick and I have a 10 month old son so I have to write quickly and did not have the time to proof what I wrote. Lets start over. I have a computer which came with XP. THe hard drive is a SATA drive. I partioned the hard drive to have 2 partitions and installed Vista. So now I have a dual boot. I pulled out an old 10gig hard drive which is IDE. The bios for some reason made the 10gig hard drive the primary drive to boot from. I changed it to be secondary. The 10gig hard drive has nothing on it. Nothing. So now my boot order is the Sata drive, then the IDE drive. Instead of getting the dual boot option like I did before I installed the IDE drive, the pc booted right into Vista. WHen I unplugged the IDE drive I got the dual boot option again. Now remember this 10gig IDE drive has nothing on it. I decided to change the IDE drive to a slave even though there is no other drive on the IDE cable. Once I changed it to slave I got the dual boot option. Just like it was before I installed the IDE drive. I do not understand why the IDE drive has to be a slave with no other device connected and the drive is clean?

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OK then, it sounds like you have only one IDE hard drive. "The 10gig hard drive has nothing on it. " You said you formatted the 10gb drive. As I said.... "A drive that is completely blank (empty) is not the same situation as one that has been partitioned and formatted and has no user data on it (empty of useful data)." If it is partitioned and formatted, the only or first partition on any physical hard drive is the active partition - that partition, or another partition on the drive, is not bootable until an operating system is installed on it. The bios by default looks for the active partition on a physical hard drive, and then determines if it is bootable or not. When you first partition and format a drive, the only partition, or the first partition if it has more than one, is the active one by default, but if it has more than one partition, another partition can be made the active, and optionally, bootable, partition later, or when you run Setup. In your case when you installed Vista on the SATA drive second, it's partition became the active, and bootable, one. The dual boot feature was automatically installed and toggles which partition and operating system is active and bootable - only one can be on a physical drive at a time. I believe your situation is caused by: - your bios by default probably looks for an active partition on a drive seen as master first. It looks for an active partition on a drive seen as slave second , but probably only once all the other drives installed have been checked to see if an active partition on a drive seen as master is found - if one is found and it is bootable, it is booted, and the bios does not check the other drives further. - If the empty of useful data IDE drive is before the SATA drive in the boot order, or apparently in your bios's case even if it is the second hard drive??, if it is set to master it is looked at by the bios to see if it's active partition is bootable, it is found not to be, and the bios goes to on the next active partition on the next drive in the list to see if it is bootable, it finds it is, which is Vista, the second op system installed on the SATA drive, which is the one that actually has the dual boot feature. - The dual boot feature is enabled on the SATA drive only if the bios examines it first. Without the dual boot feature, you can only boot into Vista beause only one partition on the physical SATA drive can be active and bootable at a time. Since Vista was installed second, that's Vista by default. - when the IDE drive is seen as slave, it is not examined by the bios until all drives seen as master are examined until the first one found bootable is booted, and if that's the case, the bios does not check the other drives further, so it never examines the IDE drive seen as slave. The dual boot feature is enabled in that case because the SATA drive was examined by the bios first. ..... I don't know why this happens to you when the IDE drive is the second hard drive in the boot order - are you sure you checked the boot order to make sure it was second after you hooked up the IDE drive each time? If you're correct, that sounds like a bios code bug (mistake) to me. .... Older mboards/bioses will not recognize a hard drive jumpered as slave (master / slave jumpering), or seen as slave (cable select jumpering , on the middle connector) at all, if it is by itself on a data cable, but many newer mboards/bioses will. I assume you can see the IDE drive when it is jumpered or seen as slave on this mboard.

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How is the 10GB drive seen in My computer? If C: is Vista, D: is 10GB IDE and E: is XP, the computer is doing what you Setup. "Boot first to Vitsta, next to IDE, Last to XP". If there is NO OS on the 10GB IDE there is no reason to have it in the Boot Order. I can't explain the Dual Boot option disappearing with the 10GB IDE connected as Slave, however if it's for storage only, Jumper the 10GB IDE as Master on it's IDE chanel, and eliminate the 10GB IDE from the Boot Order. Your Drive letters C:, D:, E: should reflect how you want to use each one. XP allows changing Drive letters to suit your needs, something Win9X did not allow. There is nothing to learn from someone who already agrees with you.

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"XP allows changing Drive letters to suit your needs,..." You can change any drive letter except the one assigned to the partition Windows is booted from, but only to a drive drive letter not already being used, in Disk Management. If you need to change drive letters, you may need to temporarily assign other drive letters to free up the ones you want to use, then re-assign drive letters again to the ones you want to use. 2000 and above assign drive letters in the order in which drives or partitions are discovered by the operating system. E.g. if you have one hard drive, with one partition, one optical drive when Setup is run, the single partition on the hard drive is C, the optical drive is D. If you later add an optical drive or another partition on a hard drive, they are assigned E, F, etc. without changing the original drive letters assigned to whatever. If you install a second operating system on the computer, 2000 and XP, and I assume Vista, will not use drive letters already assigned to partitions it recognizes when Setup is being run. E.g. if XP was on the computer originally, and was using C, D, E, a second installation of XP will assign the F drive letter to the partition Windows is installed on. If you want the second XP installation to use C, disconnect the other hard drives while Setup is being run, and whenever you run Setup after that. If you want the computer to dual boot, you can enable that after Setup has run, e.g. by modifying boot.ini in the Recovery Console with bootcfg. If you are installing a second operating system on a drive that already has an operating system on another partition, if you want the second installation to use C, you need to disconnect other hard drives AND make the other partition with an operating sysyem on it on the drive invisible to the second operating system while Setup is being run. E.g. one way to do that is to Hide the other partition by using a partition manipulation program such as Partition Magic 8.x before you run Setup, then you un-hide it after Setup has finished. Win ME and below use different rules to assign drive letters. You can assign an optical drive to higher drive letters easily, but the rest of them are determined by how you connect the drives and by how many drives and partitions on the drives you have. The optical drives are assigned the first drive letters available after all the hard drive partitions have been assigned letters.

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