K8N Neo4 Platinum, how to move MBR to sata (make it drive #1)?

I am not sure I am phrasing the question correctly, so bear with me. I have a K8N Neo4 platinum with the SiI3114 controller and sata ports 4-8 (I believe its what they are calling PCB 1.x) with bios v1.D. I moved the board to another box and installed winXP on it. I was running it with IDE hard drives. Everything was working great but the OS was running really slow so I bought a SATA 300 mb/s drive and pluged it into SATA1 (I read about using ports 3 and 4 for raid but I do not want to use the NVraid at all, it is disabled). Then I proceeded to reinstall win XP. In the setup, I deleted the original C partiton and created one on the sata drive and rebooted so that there would be no "C" drive confusion by the winxp setup (have had that problem before and this keeps it from happening). Went through the setup and the sata was correctly reported as "C". Told windows to install itself there but it told me that it needed to write to MBR on the old c drive but that, since I had deleted the partiton, it couldn't and had to format it. So I knew that something was wrong.
So I rebooted and disabled the ide bus that contained the old IDE drive and just left the CD ide bus enabled. WinXP installed fine with no complaints. Then it rebooted and I re-enabled the ide bus in the bios. It wouldn't boot into the partiton I just installed winxp on! To get it to boot, I had to use F11 (the bios boot menu) and select the sata drive. Went through the whole setup winXP thing and rebooted. Same problem, it wouldn't boot the sata drive. :(
As long as that ide bus with the old ide drive is enabled, it won't boot the sata drive! I have rearranged the boot order on the bios every way possible. I opened up the box and moved that ide chain with the old ide drive to the ide2 port and put the dvd drive on ide1. I made the old drive slave and the prior slave master. That didn't fix it either. How do I tell this motherboard that the 1st drive is the sata drive? How do I tell it the MBR should be there not on the old ide drive? How do I fix this? Thanks!

Thank you for your replies! Hans, thank you I will give it a go again doing full formats all the way. I usually use the full format when installing winXP but I did things in a different order than you instructed so I will definately try it.
Aicjofs, thank you, There are 3 hard drives in this system currently. There is the ide hard drive that used to be the "c" drive (a western digital 160gb ata133 7200rpm 8mb cache) and a second ide hard drive that is an extended partition with 1 logical drive with data on it (western digital 300gb ata133 7200rpm 8mb cache). Then there is a sata hard drive in sata1 port with 2 partitions one primary and one extended. The extended partion does have data on it as I moved stuff there after I got winXP up the 2nd time (western digital 250gb sata II 7200rpm 16mg cache).  Right now, I have the ide drive with data on it as ide2 master and the old "c" drive as ide2 slave and it is unformatted and contains no partion information (I deleted the partition  after I installed the SATA drive and installed winXP). XP won't boot. What happens is that, if I take the winxp cd out, it gives me a "no system" error. If I leave the WinXP cd in it boots that disk. However, if I use "f11" and choose to boot the sata drive, winxp comes up just fine. If I disable the ide bus with the two ide hard drives, it boots winxp just fine.
Edit: bios is v1.D. It feels like this mobo is telling windows setup that the master ide drive is the first disk and to ignore everything else. It feels like if I can just tell the mobo that the sata drive is the first disk then everything will work . It is late night where I am now, and I've been fighting with this since the afternoon so I might have to goto sleep but I will be back at it tomorrow and will go though what Hans instructed. If anyone has any otehr ideas, I'd really appreciate that as well.

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    Quote
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    Quote
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    Quote
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    Quote from: watson on 08-March-06, 00:54:50
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    Quote from: watson on 08-March-06, 00:54:50
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    Quote from: watson on 08-March-06, 00:54:50
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  • K8N Neo4 Platinum nForce4 Ultra and 4 GB SDRAM DDR 400 Problem

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    Quote
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  • K8N Neo4 Platinum problems

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    Strange things happen??:
    I have Seti@Home ( a very CPU-intensive application ) as my screen saver. I was supprised to see that my new computer ( Athlon 3800+, 1GB ram ) seems to be slower than my old AtlonXP 1700+! What was happening here? My investigations result was: Whenever the screensaver is active the cpu is clocked down. I come to this conclusion because first the computer is really slow and second the cpu-temperature was almost on idle levels ( measured with ntune ). When i disable the screensaver at all and let seti run as normal application everything is as expected. Well either this is WindowsXp SP2 or the bios i would say - before anyone has to ask: Cool'n Quite is disabled in bios. Anyone else has the same effekt?
    Thanks for any reply.
    My System in detail:
    WindowsXP SP2 with uptodate drivers
    MSI K8n Neo4 Platinum motherboard
    AMD Athlon 3800+
    1GB ram Corsair Twinx1024 XMS 3200XL ( 2x512MB ) in Dimm slot 3,4
    Asus GeForce 6800 GT graphic card
    Creative Audigy Player sound card
    HDDs: WD Raptor 74GB + Hitachi 250GB SATA
    Plextor DVD and LITE-ON sohw-1673s DVD-burner
    WinTV PCI

    Quote from: Assaf on 13-April-05, 04:39:15
    Spread spectrum means the frequency is modulated (not constant) - so it will be measured differantly.
    I don't see this as an issue, but why do you need it enabled anyway ?
    The frequency thing is strange since Cool'n Quiet is disabled, maybe you have Core Center running and doing something to the frequency ?
    Thanks for the reply.
    Naturally i don't need the spread spectrum, but it was enabled by default and i was curious.
    No, core center ( or something similar ) isn't running. Atm i don't want to change any frequencies, i just want to build it as stable as possible ( and fast, naturally ).   And one other thing: seti is running quite well - it needs 2 to 2.5 hours to process a seti-work-unit - when the computer is running normal, but it slows down to about 1/3 of its speed when seti is running as screensaver, it needs 6 hours and more to complete one seti-work-unit. Isn't that exactly what Cool'nQuiet is doing ( among other things ) : reducing the clock speed to one third? :-(
    Btw. in bios the ACPI Standby State is set to S1 ( i think that may be of interest ). I am running bios version 1.2
    Well, atm i have disabled ( in windows )  any power management ( and screensavers ) and the computer doesn't throttle down the processor any more.
    Well, someone has any idea how i can find out what is the problem with my computer?
    Thanks in advance for any reply.

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