Looks like you're having a problem with mixing the two disk hardware types. I've had a similar problem with a mother board that had an early ide 133 bus in addition to a ide 100 bus. Try using the boot.ini in the windows 2003 to boot your XP. Here is a sample I use to boot multiple XP installs. Note the line for the sdb drive. The quoted phrase is information for use when the boot loader is active. [boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(4)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP 3sda5 Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP 3sdb1 Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP 3sda3 Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn Robert McBroom