dual boot problem

I have two 160 GB SATA,s on an Intel DG33bu board with the latest bios. After installing Seven 64 bit on one of the drives with the other drive connected (XP 32 bit installed and working), I have to change the boot priority every time I start up to boot into Seven or XP. I,ve tried bcdedit in Seven and easy bcd 1.7.2 but neither made any difference. I also have Vista Home premium on a different 120 GB and if I connect it instead of the Seven 160GB it will give me the option to boot Vista or XP. Any ideas?

Hello ratcat welcome to the site

Have you concidered using a third party Boot Manager. After installing the Boot Manager you will have an option to boot to Multiple Drive. Check out this link VistaBootPro

P.S. Some of the freeware Boot Managers do not allow booting to multiple drives. They only allow Booting to multiple partitions.

I second vista boot pro, worked wondera for my XP andW7 boot problems.

Thanks guys, I will try that. I have no sound either My 9800 GTX+ works fine but my Creative Fatality sound card doesnt work. I know its fine because it works in XP. I installed the drivers for W7 but I get the message that I have no sound device.

I installed Vista boot pro V 3.3.0 and set it up with W7 and XP. My computer became unusable giving me only W7 option at boot but when I hit "enter" it told me to insert the installation disk. I disconnected that drive and Vista/XP both work ok now. Looks like I will have to reinstall W7 although I did make a backup beforehand.

I presume you have tried using "comand prompt" then "msconfig" and you can change the boot order there?
I had troubles getting mine to load dual boot and ended up using the repair disk to establish dual boot then comand prompt to get my boot order...Luck

Thanks for the reply ronpeck but it is a little ambiguous. What command do you enter into the command prompt? In which OS? I have never launched msconfig from Cmd prompt only the run dialogue box. I might end up formatting the new 160 and creating two partitions, one for XP and one for Seven. I still use XP because the surround sound works very well but I was never able to get it to work in Vista.

Either OS will have the same result
Bring up comand promt and type in"msconfig" then when box comes up click on the tab "Boot" in there will be the two OS's select one and make it the default,click "Save"
Works fine for me

OK I get it now, basically open msconfig either way and click on the boot.ini tab. Trouble is when I connect up the seven HDD and boot into the XP HDD, update the field that shows what os,s there are (in msconfig), Seven does not appear at all. It works OK with the Vista drive but I really want to stay with XP for the time being.