[jcerecke]

Right...
so I have 5 harddrives in my computer
IDE Channel 0 Master = 80gb
Sata Ch 0 = 400gb
Sata Ch 1 = 400gb
Sata Ch 2 = 320gb
Sata Ch 3 = 120gb

I have so many stupid partitions it's not funny... but to start clearing them up I'd like to do a fresh install of WinXP.
I'd like it to be on the 400GB drive on Sata ch0, which is fine, but when windows is trying to install it always puts ntldr and boot.ini etc etc etc on the 80GB drive.
I'm currently living off a bootable windows Live CD, which I'm using to do all my partitioning through Paragon partition manager.

On the 400gb on sata ch0 theres 2 primary partitions, to which I'm trying to install to the firstmost one. This partition is also an active partition. On the 80gb theres only an ext partition with a bunch of logical partitions inside it. Now this leaves 8mb of space that isnt formatted at the start of the 80gb disk, which is where windows *makes* me put the ntldr & co. files, after it makes me format it.

This is just getting rediculous.

All help is much appreciated.

Cheers

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Hi jcerecke...Welcome to Geeks to Go.

Disconnect all the drives except the 400 GB drive you want to install to. Format the first partition and install Windows on it. You may need to install the SATA drivers during the installation, it would be helpful to have them handy either on floppy or cd.

Once you have installed Windows, connect your other drives and you can do as you wish with them using the Disk Management console.

wannabe1

[wannabe1]

Hi jcerecke...Welcome to Geeks to Go.

Disconnect all the drives except the 400 GB drive you want to install to. Format the first partition and install Windows on it. You may need to install the SATA drivers during the installation, it would be helpful to have them handy either on floppy or cd.

Once you have installed Windows, connect your other drives and you can do as you wish with them using the Disk Management console.

wannabe1

[bjsnl]

On occasions it is also possible to change thee order of the disks in your bios.
Normal behaviour is always for the bios, and therefore windows. To start with IDE disks, and only the SATA disks.
In my bios i could change the order of the disks.
For windows this worked very well. My ntldr and boot.ini are on my first SATA disk.

But just a word of caution - if you do this - and later you want to install maybe a dual boot linux (dont'know if you want that) - it can make it a bit harder, as there the default will still go to the IDE disk.

The answer of wannabe1 will also most definately work.

[jcerecke]

I can't believe it's that simple... it shouldn't be that simple. I was trying to do it with partitioning and I even tried playing around with bios order too, but none of it worked.
But cheers though. I've got it sorted now.