Installing SATA Drive - Automatically becomes Drive E? Want it to be Drive C

[LABachlr]

I am building a 3GHz system with the Intel D865PERL, and this is the first time that I have used SATA drives. Here is how it is setup:

Primary IDE Master: Plextor 8X DVD+/-RW
Secondary IDE Master: Iomega Zip 250
SATA Port 0: Maxtor 7200RPM 8MB SATA Drive
SATA Port 1: Maxtor 7200RPM 8MB SATA Drive

When I was trying to install XP, when I created a partition on the Maxtor on SATA 0, it automatically named it Drive E. It is because of the two drives that I have on the Primary and Secondary IDE channels. So, how do I get it to name the drive C:? I checked the BIOS, but did not see a setting that would fix this issue.

Second question, this board has 4 slots for RAM, and they are broken up into Channel A and Channel B. I have two sticks of 512 400DDR in there. Should I have one it Channel A Slot 0 and the other in Channel B Slot 0? The way it is set up now is one chip is on Channel A Slot 0, and the other one is in Channel A Slot 1. Which is the best arrangement?

[LABachlr]

I just tried to update the BIOS to see if that would help. I used the floppy disk version. When it was in the process of doing it, it said that it was copying a program, sw.exe, from the a: drive to the c: drive, but the c: drive is the DVD burner!

It did its thing, and then asked to have me remove the floppy disk from the drive and hit enter, and said NOT TO DO A THING until it had finished. Well, it has been about 10 minutes, and it is still just displaying a blinking cursor (blinking underscore) on a black screen. I hope this didn't hurt the mobo. I'm guessing that it did not complete the process because there was not a c: drive to write to.

I did look at Intel's site for some answers, and it said by default, booting from SATA drives is disabled in the BIOS. You have to change it. But it didn't tell how! It did say how to enable RAID, but I don't want that feature.

Here is the page I am referring to:

http://support.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/CS-010691.htm

Anyone have any ideas? Would appreciate any ASAP. Thanks.

[Rob R.]

Try going to BIOS\advanced\drive configuration. Make sure this area is correct.

Now go to boot\hard disk drives and pull down the submenu and choose the correct drive.

[LABachlr]

Thanks, but it was simply a matter of disconnecting the zip drive while I installed the OS.

[LABachlr]

Also had to recover the bios.

[Rob R.]

Isn't that just the worst when it is something like that and you spend hours troubleshooting it?

Glad you figured it out :)

[LABachlr]

LOL. You're not lying.

Thanks. Ditto!