This is not necessarily true. Depending on the motherboard maker, you can choose which drive is the first drive. This adjusts the mappings.

yeah like I said:

In your BIOS it will have a Hard Drive Boot Priority settings... make sure that "External Device" or "Onboard/Onchip SATA" is the first choice before your IDE drive

I think on the ABIT NF7-S v2.0 it is called "Onboard Device" for the SATA controller...

It doesn't seem to allow you to choose which is the first device...or the first device Windows XP setup see's.

just unplug the ide cable from the hdd

after all it takes a split second for xp to install the new hdd.. in xp..

Isn't that what I said?

well sort of u said remove it I specified what to do

I don't have experience with Abit boards but mainly with ASUS and Intel. In the AMI BIOS of these boards with the Intel ICH4/5/5R, the SATA controllers are listed as IDE 3 and 4. If you have both PATA and SATA drivers connected, you need to go and change the Boot Drive Priority. By default the PATA drives are listed first. But if you highlight the first boot device and hit the enter key, you will see all the bootable drives listed. Then you just select the drive you want booted first, PATA or SATA, master or secondary. If the SATA controller is not native to the chipset, then it will be designated as a SCSI drive and you have to choose to boot from SCSI as the first device.

well sort of u said remove it I specified what to do

OK, OK ...