Multiple Hard Drives and Windows XP

Ok so I put in a 2 ~40 gig raptors and a 300gig standard WD disk in my computer. One of the raptors isnt recognized at all, the other, when i try to install windows xp on it, says that the partition available isnt windowsXP compatible. So i installed the OS on my 300gig drive and then formatted the raptor drive that was recognized via disk management and then reinstalled windows on the raptor. So far so good, then i decided to format the 300g drive to remove windows from it, but when i did this i could no longer boot as it told me it was missing a required file. As of now I have windows on both the raptor and the 300gig disk and the raptor has the title (boot) where the 300g has the title (system). I'm using a nforce 650i sli mobo.

my questions are:

1) i currently have 4 sata slots taken up, is that whats causing my second raptor not to be recognized (as its on the 5th sata cable)

2) does the sata slot i have my hard drives in make a difference as far as my OS? right now the 300gig is on sata 0 and the raptor is on sata 4

3) is there anyway to switch the "system" and "boot" tags given to the individual drives?

What shows in boot order in Bios?

Do you get a choice of which drive to boot from at startup?

I would choose what drive I wanted to boot from then disconnect everything else and do a repair install on that drive to get it to be the bootable windows drive and be sure that drive is set in the boot order
Then begin hooking drives back up and formatting and assigning drive letters as needed.