Thanks for the reply
I was more interested in the regular ide hard drive setup
To be more specific I can make a slave drive bootable from xp but perhaps I should have used another word for bootable
What I meant was to make the slave drive a system drive
Like when I boot from the windows 98 startup floppy I can type sys c: and make the hard drive bootable to the command prompt and I can also use the format c: /s from the hard drive to do the same thing to a slave drive

I am somewhat new to xp so I am not too familiar with it but I tried those things and those commands are not used in xp
The other problem I see is that xp doesn't seem to have a dos command prompt it's only available in safe mode so that means that xp cannot be installed from the command prompt unless a windows 98 boot disk is used
Keep in mind that I am trying to see if the post about installing xp without a cd or floppy can be done

I was wondering about a third party boot manager but I am not sure how would that work
Would that have to be installed on the primary drive or the slave ?