how do you assign which hd partition windows xp home will install onto?

[chunkstyle]

hey

i was installing win xp home recently, ans was surprised to find that it ended up on a different hd than i'd expected. i've got 2 hard drives, one a seagate 40gb and the other a western 160gb. the 40gb had one 20gb partition that i'd told the setup program to format as ntfs and make bootable. the 160gb hd had a 40gb +/- partition, also formatted ntfs. i don't remember specifically making that partition a bootable one (maybe i did by accident that last time). i don't even know if you can have more than one bootable partition on one machine. i thought maybe i'd missed some dialog box during windows installation, or screwed up, so i reformatted the drives. & reinstalled windows, this time sitting around & watching the installation.

i was careful, though, this time, to leave the 160gb drive unpartitioned, hoping to force the installer to put windows on the other drive's partition, where i wanted it.

it worked like i'd hoped, but now i'm wondering if this is the only way you can make windows install where you want it.

is this the case? is it normal for there to be no dialog box or anything where you tell the installer where you want the os to go?

i built a computer last spring with win xp pro and 2 hd's, and didn't have any problems like this on. is it a difference between xp home & xp pro?

thanks!

[pillainp]

The installer should show you both disks and ask where you want the install to go (Disk0/HDD0 is Master, Disk1/HDD1 is slave). You can then choose to create new partitions, delete existing ones or format them (FAT32/NTFS/NTFS Quick Format/Use Existing File System), and you can specify the size of new partitions if creating them.