3 harddrives..how do i do it

[kronoSX]

On your mobo, do you have 1 or 2 IDE ports?

as far as I can remeber from my IDE days [on SATA now ] that you could only have 2 HDD/CD/DVD drives on one cable.

Try making it:
Primary HDD - Master
Secondary HDD - Slave
Third HDD - Salve on second IDE slot

That shold work I have run 3 HDD's and 1 DVD dsrive off my old PC's IDE slots

that is my config to exactly,but cant boot dualboot into xp,like this

 

[kronoSX]

Did you check wether the bios is set to actually boot from your ide 1 - Vista/Xp drive?
Can you boot without the 3rd hdd? Unplug IDE 1 (Vista/XP drive) and see if ur bios detects the 3rd hdd then try to boot and see if you get the same error - if you do ur bios is probably set to boot off 3rd hdd!
Did that make sence to you?

yes i can and bios do detect 3rd drive

 

[kronoSX]

Haven't read everyone else's responses, but it's pretty simple. Check the jumpers and IDE connections to make sure that:

Hard drive 1 (Vista) = Primary master
Hard drive 2 (XP) = Primary slave
DVD writer = Secondary master
Hard drive 3 (empty) = Secondary slave

Then in your BIOS set Hard drive 2 as the boot up drive.

Once in Windows XP, go to System Properties, Advanced, Start Up and Recovery Settings, then you can set how much time you have to choose between choosing XP and Vista at the boot up screen.

i cant set xp as boot up cause the boot manager of vista controls everything
No matter what i do ijust cant get it right.
I noticed in vista boot loader when i select xp i get a error that the configuration is wrong,so with 2 xp systems on does not fix this

 

[kronoSX]

update...i have now installed xp on the 3rd drive with all other drives unplugged.
So i want a boot system that has vista xp and xp
Yeah i know it was stupid doing this.
Now i have vista which is Cdrive--1st hdd
xp Ddrive----2nd hdd
xp Cdrive----3rd hdd

So how would i load them all,I know the c and c wont work..its logic
i tried changing the drive letter in vista for the 3rd drive but it just fked up,so i reformated and tried again to connect all 3 drives and came up with the same problem from the thread starter...
I tried most of youlls fixes but i just cant see why its doing this.
I never tried deleting the mbr... should i try that