win xp has to be the last os on the drive. the oldest has to be installed first. I installed me on a 40 gig drive. moved the 40 gig to secondary. then installed another 20 gig and installed xp xp did not find the secondary drive with win me on it. I read some of the documention and it will find it if it is on the same physical disk. at least this is my understanding right now

It has something to do with the MBR I think? The none NT systems have to be installed on the first partition on the first drive. Ok, some of you will say "That is not true". Indeed, it isn't but it is the easyest way to install a dualboot system. What you do you do now? - place the 40G as your primery drive and your 20G as the secondary (so ME will/can boot), insert the XP CD and reinstall XP on the secondary drive (XP has no problems with that). My sugestion is, if you will do a new installation of the two systems: 20G master on IDE 0 and 2 partitions 40G slave on IDE 0 and partitions as you like (Not more than 32G if using FAT32) Install ME on the first partition (FAT32) and XP on the second partition (NTFS) of the 20G disk. and use the 40G as a data disk. (if something goes wrong with one of the systems, you always have your data) That's the way I install my systems, only I use 98SE and not ME.

Thanks for the input, I got so frustrated, I used a boot loader instead. But now If this happens again,, I will know to install XP as secondary, not primary. Thanks