Multi os's on three drives

I would say because they are not all different OS's. Further in the BIOS there should be a section where you state which drive you boot from first, if not that, then the second boot, and one harddisk is always the master (which is booted from) and the second drive is a slave drive if on the same SATA connection or even with using the connection in the computer which is always 14 for the primary connection and 15 for the secondary connection. Usually there is a DVD-drive in there somewhere which is actually probably marked as a master drive also so your computer can start from a DVD or start-up CD or the original OS's CD if they still include those. That means that the other harddisk if there was one would have to be a slave drive and those slaved drives can not be booted from, only from a master marked harddisk drive. As far as I understand.

Thanks spacealf, I knew about the bios boot sequence settings but they didn't seem to be making any difference. You completely lost me what you talk about 14 & 15, I have 9 sata ports on my GA_X58A board.

Anyway I loaded acronis OS selector and so far so good, it sees all three drives and OS's and I can boot in to any of them now. I used to use it years ago and stopped because of problems with the MBR (master boot record) becoming corrupted that was allegedly due to acronis but I always much prefered it to using the windows loader as it lets you name each OS amongst other things.
The blue screens seem to have stopped although I have no idea what was causing them, I'm guessing it might have been a driver problem although I'm not convinced but since I updated pretty much everything it seems to have abated for now.

As for microsoft s licencing, I have read two articles, both from reliable sources, and both completely contradict each other about dual booting and the licence but since I was able to activate both copies on line I figured it was fine. 
It's absurd that they think I should pay for it twice when using it on one machine.


Steve