Hi, when you say fiddle with your bios, do you mean go into it and change which HDD it starts from? or something else. It's just that whenever i have loaded a second OS into my PC that has 3 HDD's the boot always seems to be on the first HDD, unless i disconnect the drives-install-reconnect then when it starts i click F11(on my PC on the laptop its F12) then select which drive/OS i want.
As a suggestion do you have a copy of Gparted if not download it burn it to disc and run it as a live CD, it will then give you a good idea of what you have in your setup as far as HDD's and partitions go. I.e where boot is etc.

Raz