Rorrim

well, for one, I would keep xp on the sata drive, the game host OS needs to be on a fast hard drive. If your looking for speed in playing consider getting a faster video card instead, with a dedicated gpu (graphics processing unit) this will take a huge load off of your cpu.

If you are determined to try it tho, here are the steps you need to do to safely change xp over to the ide drive.

1 Go into Bios and set the boot order to the cdrom then ide drive, the sata drive should be last.
2 Power off the computer and disconnect the sata drive, this will be your backup in case you do something wrong.
3 move the jumper on the ide card from slave to master.
4 Plop the win disk into the cdrom drive and install windows xp normally. the ide will become the c drive as you do this.
5 make sure that it is a stable xp install, and you have all drivers installed.
6 Plug in the sata drive with the pc powered off then boot. Providing that you have the boot order set to the IDE drive as the master boot it should not even attempt to read the sata drive unless something is wrong.

There is a little known fact about xp, if you have a fully running xp on a hard drive, yet properly configured as a slave then there will be no conflicts. So, you could easily keep xp on the sata in case you want to return to the sata at a later date. However, you would have to reinstall any game files and stuff should you return to the sata drive for the sata's system would not have the proper registry keys.