Obviously, I have not messed with serial ATA HD's before. Let's say I go with two serial ATA HD's on ports 0 and 1 (non-RAID), a optical drive on IDE 100 Primary Master and a regular HD on Primary Slave, and then a second optical drive on IDE 100 Secondary Master.

With the P4C800-E MB, what determines which HD is your Primary that you would have your Active OS partition on?

I'm sure it's a dumb question, but I'm not shy. Still running my trusted CUSL2, so this is new ground for me. Just developing my plan for a new system this fall. Any links would be appreciated. Thanks.

You can install the Windows to any drive. In the MB bios, you can set whatever drive you want as drive #1, 2, 3, etc. By default the primary/master IDE will be drive #1, but that can be changed in MB bios.

You do this by just setting up the boot order the way you want?

What if you had two identical hard drives.  How would you distinquish between them in the drive listing on the BIOS boot menu?

The bios will look to drive #1 for boot/system files. This is not where you set boot order floppy > hard drive > CDROM. When you get in there, you'll see what I mean. This is where you order the different hard drives you might have.

If you have two identical drives, you will see two identical entries, which will make it difficult to differentiate which is which.

The SATA drive on the first SATA controller will be Primary drive #3, and the next/last will be Primary drive #4. IDE controllers get Primary drives #1 and 2.

The thing is you have control and options. Again, it will become clear when you get in the bios.

Thanks Gruber!