my dad's pc was built back in 2003 by www.thepcmanyj.com it has a Jetway PT880DAS motherboard and presently has 2 IDE hard drives, a 250GB hard drive running Windows Vista and a 250GB drive for data storage. my dad has found that certain programs like Nero 9 for example do not work well on Windows Vista so he has a seperate 200GB hard drive with Windows XP on it which if he needs to use it he opens the case unplugs Vista and plugs in XP. however this is a bit of a pain and my uncle Ian suggested to my dad that he look into setting up his PC for multi booting so he can just select which operating system he wants to boot into from a menu during standard boot up. we have found a program called OSL2000 to handle the boot menu the real problem now is how to configure the hardware, we are looking to purchase windows 7 when it comes out, we each plan to buy it on an OEM licence and buy a 1TB internal SATA drive for data storage as the required hardware component for OEM eligability. my dad has 2 SATA ports on his motherboard and i presently have 2 x 320GB SATA drives in my PC 1 for the OS and 1 for data storge, the idea is we will load windows 7 on to the 320GB SATA drive that i use for data storage and plug it into his SATA-1 port in his SATA-2 port we will plug in the 1TB SATA that he will buy with Windows 7, we then want to use his 250GB IDE hard drive for Windows XP. now he currently has the Vista drive set as primary master, the data drive as primary slave, the DVD Rom drive as secondary master and the DVD-RW as secondary slave but what do we set the SATA drives to in his PC, do we set Windows 7 to be a master and data as a slave or do both SATA drives have to be slaves? if anyone can help me figure out the best way of doing this i would be very grateful. Stuart.

An OS does NOT need a huge amount of space. IF you partition properly, 25GB should be more than enough. Your problem is you apparently don't know how to setup partitions. There should be one for the OS, one for programs & one for data storage. Partitioning Strategies "he currently has the Vista drive set as primary master, the data drive as primary slave, the DVD Rom drive as secondary master and the DVD-RW as secondary slave" Whenever possible, you should separate similar IDE/PATA devices & set them up so that data is transfered from one channel to the other, not between two devices sharing the same cable/channel. Here's how it *should* be configured: primary master = Vista drive primary slave = DVD-ROM 2ndary master = DVD-RW 2ndary slave = data drive or if cabling is a problem, here's an alternative: primary master = Vista drive primary slave = DVD-ROM 2ndary master = data drive 2ndary slave = DVD-RW There is no master/slave for SATA drives.

no master / slave for sata drives? ah so regardless of the current configuration if i add in a SATA drive it won't cause any problems? thank you thats really good to know.

You are overthinking the solution to this. You do not need OSL2000 for anything. Vista's bootloader is capable of configuring your machine to boot from XP & Vista. The only thing is, the built-in Vista tool (BCDEdit) is not as intuitive as compared to using a program like EasyBCD because it offers a GUI for managing or manipulating Vista's MBR. Download & install it. You won't need to be unplugging & switching disks in order to switch between OSes. Jabbering Idiots: Everywhere You Look!

sabertooth: do you know how to use the BCD Edit thingy? if you do can you please talk me through it as i would prefer to know how to do it without the need for third party software is possible, i remember the good old days of DOS so i am intelligent enough to use it if i have instructions but no your correct its not as intuative as a GUI one.

http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/2014... Jabbering Idiots: Everywhere You Look!