alright, this is rather embarassing. i have reformatted my hard disks and reinstalled windows plenty of times. i recently decided to use my 250gb sata hd, which currently has windows on it, as a storage disk. i have a 60gb that i wanted to load windows and mandriva onto. so i disconnected my sata hd and put in my 60gb, hooking it up to my primary ide slot and hooking up my cdroms to the secondary slot. the hd is currently set as the master. i loaded up my computer, changed my boot order so it reads the cdrom drive first and put in my windows cd. first off, it was taking FOREVER. way slower than normal, it usualy cranks. so i finaly got into the windows installation and formated the main partition to NFTS. it copies the installation files, restarts (still slow as hell), then goes back into the installation program. it won't do anything but replace the installation files or install to a new directory. it won't load off the hard disk either (i tried changing the boot order back). usualy this is a no-brainer. i've installed windows many times before, both the home and pro editions, but have never had this happen. i've never used this 60gb for running an OS before. do i need to make some new partition or something?? i really don't know what to do. any help would be appreciated!