actually he needs to do neither. for some reason windows xp will map c:\ to the drive it's running off. while fixing some crap on ym computer i set up more than one installation of xp on different physical drives, when i used the xp a(name of one of them) it mapped it to c: when i used xp b, it mapped it to c: and xp a as i:\ i believe. it's very easy to install xp on another drive without physically removing them, i fail to understand what the problem is. unless the drives themselves are wired improperly, the xp installation should find both physical drives and ALL the partitions avalible.