thanks a bunch zuz242, i will look into all of the things you said...

for a specific hdd boot, i dont think it was the case because i only had my Leopard hdd and my dvdrw active when i installed and when i restarted, so only 1 hdd and still didnt work. if i make it 'active' the partition (actually the whole hdd since there is only 1 partition on it), wont it screw with my vista/xp installations? right now the partition with Vista is marked as ACTIVE