I had missed the part where you had said you couldn't find PS/2 ports on your motherboard.. yep, they should indeed be there
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Indicidentally, if you really want to hide drives in XP (or any NT based OS), you simply need to unmap it. This is done through Control Panel(classic)/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Manager. Right click on a drive mapping and you can remove its mapping. By mapping, I mean like 'D:', or 'E:'.
A cool feature of NT/NTFS is that you can also map drives into folders of other drives. i.e. "c:\drive2" can reference some totally different partition. Drives can be mapped to multiple locations too, as you'll see.
In addition, a related feature, junction points, aren't so readily exposed by the OS to the user, but allow you to create 'virtual folders', in that a folder points to another folder. i.e. "c:\myfolder1" is actually "d:\somefolder". SysInternal's Junction utility will create these junction points for you.
For my own set-up, I always map the folder "c:\dev" to my development partition. This way I have a static path to my development projects no matter what partition they are really on.
Oh well, I'm off topic. These virtual folders are very useful, but Microsoft has so far not made them so readily apparent to users because it seems to confuse the average Joes, and Mrs. Joes.
Tootalloo. Good luck on ur dual boot experiments. You might consider just using VMWare to host client/guest OSes under a primary host OS. This makes it really easy to create snapshots of the installations, revert them to a specific state, and isolate the OS from your physical computer. Someday this will be what we all do, as virtualization is improved at the hardware level by new CPUs. For now though, client OSes still run quite smooth..sometimes smoother than the host OS, since VMWare will, by default, force more client virtual memory to remain resident in RAM than under normal conditions.
And of course there is VirtualPC, which is arguably easier to use than VMWare.