New Hard Drive for storage - Windows wants to install on it

Question

This has been an ongoing problem of mine and I finally received a useful error to be able to figure out what is going on. I have already checked MSI's forums and Microsoft's website with no avail.
Problem:
I just put in a new hard drive (200GB seagate) and windows won't boot. I'm not surprised. Whenever I tinker with my hard drives, windows refuses to boot and I end up reinstalling XP. My interesting error occurs when I go to select an installation partition. Upon selecting my WD Raptor, Windows replies:
To install Windows XP on the partition you selected,
Setup must write some startup files to the following disk:
     190780 MB Disk 0 at id 0 on bus 0 on atapi [MBR]
However, this disk does not contain a Windows XP-compatible
partion.
What normally happens when I install windows on my sata drive is that windows also writes files to another drive which it needs in order to boot. Move the disks around and windows won't boot. In this case, the hard drive I added new is not yet formatted or even partitioned. I noticed that it was the first drive on the partion selection screen which makes me think that windows wants to use the first disk on that list as the disk to put files onto (otherwise known as C:). HOW OH HOW do I install windows without  windows putting files on multiple drives?
-Bob

Answer 1

Great news!
I installed Partition Magic (which I already own), and noticed two things.
1. My Seagate 200GB is set as Active and
2. My WD Raptor is not set as Active
Sounds easy, so let's set my Raptor as active and my Seagate as not active. But hold on, let's do one at a time and since I want to make my Raptor work, let's turn that on first. So I made my Raptor Active and rebooted (btw, I didn't change anything in bios). Upon reboot into XP partion magic popped up and did some DOS stuff and rebooted me. This time when I rebooted I jumped into bios and changed 2nd boot device to SCSI instead of HDD-0 (1st boot is cd-rom) and rebooted. Now I get this message:
NTLDR is missing
What a kick in the sack! Previously, before I made the partition magic changes, booting from SCSI would give the error:
INVALID SYSTEM DISK
INSERT VALID SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER
or something like that. This drives me to the conclusion that you guys are on a role. Indeed setting my Raptor to Active was probably all it needed in the first place. Thank you very much already for that little piece of information.
So now the new question becomes, can I copy NTLDR from my xp cd into my WINDOWS directory and assume it will boot on SCSI? (or perhaps if I would remove my Seagate). I've tried to re-copy an NTLDR file for someone a year ago but there were many different versions of the file. I can still boot to XP if I set boot device to HDD-0, don't forget. And I did a windows search for NTLDR and it doesn't come up anywhere. Now what?
-Bob