Cant boot from laptop HDD modular bay

[Serva]

Hi, I have a dell e6410 laptop with windows XP SP3 on my internal HDD. I have another HDD with windows 7 located in place of my optical drive. I want to be able to boot to either the internal XP or the modular bay Win 7. During boot sequence, which is set for internal-> modular bay-> CD/, I select F12 and choose 1 time boot to modular bay but it skips over my request and boots to the internal drive Is there a configuration I need to set? Both harddrives are labelled as C:\. My laptop is hot swappable but it errors out with message" Cannot enable because it conflicts with another resource" So I can neither boot to the modular bay nor can I insert it successfully with XP already running. Anyone have Any Ideas?. By the way.., I installed windows 7 on the Modular Bay HDD while it was installed in the internal bay then moved it to the modular bay if that makes a difference. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

Can you boot to the modular if the XP drive is disconnected?

Have you ever been able to boot the modular?

Have you experimented with different motherboard ports?

 

[Serva]

Yes, I can boot to the modular drive if I remove the internal drive. When I first installed the internal/ modular combination, All worked fine. Then just out of the blue it started to malfunction and I honestly cant remember if I caused it or not. Im not sure I understand what you mean by trying other ports unless your asking have I tried booting as a cd\dvd instead of modular, which I did try.