Multibooting with SATA drive - very confused

Hi folks,

I'm having problems setting up a multiboot system. My mobo is an Asus P4P800-SE, and I'm running three harddrives, a 160 GB SATA (NTFS) two IDEs, 80 and 60 GB (FAT32) . I have the two IDEs set up as masters on separate controllers.

In BIOS the 80 gig shows up as disk 1, the 60 as disk 2, and the SATA as disk three. However, in XP the SATA is my C drive; XP is installed there, and I boot from there. The IDE drives are D: and E:.

I want to install some flavor of Linux on E: and multiboot between that and C:, with D: as storage, video, etc. Of course I'll have to repartition the disk but that's not my problem.

The problem is, I haven't been able to find a boot manager that can see the SATA drive. It shows up fine in Partition Magic, and obviously XP uses it, but none of the boot managers see it at all. They all want to install to D:, presumably because it shows as disk 1 in BIOS. I've tried BootMagic (8.0), OSL2000, MasterBooter, MSTBoot, etc. I even installed RedHat on E: and tried GRUB. No luck.

Any suggestions? I know there must be a way around this.

Thanks,
Phil

Have you tried editing the boot.ini file on C:?

I have two installs of XP and by editing the boot.ini file I am presented with a choice of operating systems during POST.

Here's a copy of my file:

[boot loader]
timeout=5
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="XP Pro" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="XP Pro_2" /fastdetect

Here's a couple links that may help.
<A HREF="http://asia.cnet.com/enterprise/apps/0,39035809,39140825-39000221c-1,00.htm" target="_new">http://asia.cnet.com/enterprise/apps/0,39035809,39140825-39000221c-1,00.htm</A>
<A HREF="http://www.jsiinc.com/SUBI/tip4300/rh4397.htm" target="_new">http://www.jsiinc.com/SUBI/tip4300/rh4397.htm</A>

....WW (5.0)