I have a ASUS P4P800 SE MoBo. It has PRI, SEC, IDE channels Capable of 4 Devices. Then it has 2 additional SATA channels. So without  utilising the RAID array...one can have up to 6 seperate IDE Drives be they Hard disks or CD Roms. So My configuration is this PRIMARY IDE has 2 Drives on it Master= WDC 80Gig HHd w/WinME left over on it because it carries all of my old files and games. The Slave is a WDC 100Gig HHd for archives only (No OS on it at all)  SECONDARY channel has a DVD RW alone as the MASTER. Then I have 2 SATA drives a WDC200Gig HHd with Win XP Pro on it as my C:\ and on the other I have a Plextor SATA DVD Writer (Px-7555A) Then I have a PCI SATA card installed that gives me 2 more SATA ports and on that "add in card" I have yet another WDC 160 Gig HHd for archiving Huge DVD files...(.vobs etc...) again No OS on it at all. So in my BIOS I have a total of 4 DISK Dives and 2 DVD RWs a total of 6 devices.
But even though I can select the "order" of the drives in the BIOS then select "3 Boot Priority" devices...the Boot.INI file gets confused.

 So my problem is when I rewrite the Boot.INI how do I find out how windows XP gets the "Device ID Number"? Because "MULTI(0)DISK(0)RDISK(0)PARTITION(1)" is automatically seen as the "Primary channel  IDE MASTER" and as a result XP had rewritten the Boot.INI to Default=C:\Microsoft Windows Millenium Edition" Now in the device manager it tells me that my 200Gig XP Drive is "Disk3" but editing the Boot INI to SHOW "Disk3" STILL gives me a  "HAL32" error. Now I can still "Boot up" using a handy utility I have AND...I can even edit the Boot.INI on an NTFS Partition from DOS. (A really cool tool called "EDITBIBI") Now it gets compounded by the fact that if I use the EDITBIBI utility...it sees that same 200gig drive that Windows device mgr calls "Disk3" as "Disk1" I tried both in editing the Boot.INI and none of them will boot off of the 200gig drive that is on the sreial buss. (SATA)  Now its not a SCSI controller so there is no "Lun" in the edit thats needed.  So...how do I properly Identify the "Disk Controller number", the specific "Disk ID Number" so that I can point the NTLR to boot off of the proper Disk?  How do you identify the 2 SATA devices beyond the Standard IDE identifiers for the Pri and SEC IDE Channels? PRI Mas= Device 0 Pri Slave = Device 1 SEC Master = Device 3 SEC Slave is Device 4...beyond that what are the proper SATA Device identifiers? Where does XP Look for those Identifiers? Or...how can I edit the Boot INI to go to the disc with XP on it everytime? Because as soon as it sees the disc with Win ME on it...it rewrites the Boot.INI and I am screwed again. I know eventually I'll get rid of Win ME but certain stuff ALREADY installed on that disc will run while booted into XP! Without that Disc with Win ME on it...the same apps won't run under XP alone.