Pc with two drives help needed

[huxley]

Ok I have a new pc on its way to me which will be used mainly as a media centre it has a 200 gig sata drive with MCE on it, I also have a spare 80 gig ide drive and a copy of XP, I would like to be able to keep the two drives apart as I intend to use the sata just for mce and the 80 gig ide for playing games / down loading lost etc. This will be my first pc and dont have a clue.
(longtime laptop owner)
Many thanks in advance.

[cutmymilk]

Just connect it and windows will do the rest. Make sure that the one with windows on is the master and the 80 gig is a slave.

It will come up in My Computer as a seperate drive.

[huxley]

^ so how do I select which os to boot when it starts up or will windows give me the option?

[ascender]

Right click on my computer, properties, advanced, startup and recovery settings - allows you to choose default OS. All it does is provide a front-end to editing boot.ini which is the file you might need to edit yourself to get it working. I'm old school and find editing it easier tbh, so it might be worth looking that up on Google to familiarise yourself with how it works. Pretty simple stuff.

[huxley]

^ thanks for the pointers chaps - i have an idea of what to search for.
Cheers

[EvilBoris]

If the 80 gig is used purely for storage (I.e. no OS installed on it) you don't need to worry about anything, just plug it in and you are off.

[EvilBoris]

If the 80 gig is used purely for storage (I.e. no OS installed on it) you don't need to worry about anything, just plug it in and you are off.

[huxley]

^ I wanted to have the 1st drive for MCE and the 2nd one with XP seperate for a bit of gaming and the odd tv torrent etc as I dont want to run the risk of fecking up my media collection.

[kernow]

is that because you fear XP might somehow crush your media ?

hmm,...