Conan-

Your are thinking logically, like I was, but I learned the answer to your question is "no." WinXP doesn't easily support dual installation of the same OS. If you try to install a 2nd WinXP OS on a different drive/partition, the system always "sees" the 1st and tries to reinstall. And if you force it (I don't exactly how I did this, but I did), then what happens is WinXP is installed on both drives, but it installs the boot file on only one drive! The end result is you boot off one drive and run the OS off either. So your primary drive fails, you have an OS on the other drive, but you can't boot it and it pretty much unusable. This happened to me; even though I had a perfectly good OS on a drive, I could't force the boot files on so I had two drives, two OSs, but no boot files. I ended up reformatting. The next time around, I thought I'd be clever: I'd disconnect the SATA drives so the OS wouldn't know there was another OS available. And Installed a 2nd OS, complete with the boot files on the IDE drive. This worked, except I question is reliabily since about 30 days later, I had corrupt NTFS.sys file.

Make sense?

Scott