Vista Install on 2nd Drive on XP E521

I purchased a Dimension E521 last December (2006) which came loaded with XP. Later in February 2007, I got the Vista upgrade.

Now, after almost a year, I am ready to give Vista a try. But, not wanting to corrupt my XP setup, I bought a second SATA HD.

The original SATA HD is on SATA0 and I installed my new HD on SATA1. I went into the BIOS and disabled SATA0 and rebooted the system - only to find that it couldn't boot XP as expected.

I booted off the Vista CD and started the installation. To my surprise, when Vista's partition manager was displayed, my first SATA0 drive was displayed as "Disk0", along with all of the partition information. The new drive was listed as "Disk1" with no partitions as it had not been partitioned.

Is this the expected behavior - should SATA0 be accessible even though it was disabled via the BIOS?

Anyone have any experience in installing a dual boot Vista system on an existing XP system? I am thinking there may be conflicts with dual booting XP/Vista with the PCHEALTH, System Restore subsystems.

Thanks in advance for any information.

Edit: fixed formatting.

Message Edited by ErnieZ on 11-13-2007 07:11 PM