New Install - Boot Issues

[Jman13]

Well, my computer was going flaky on me....doing odd crap, so I did a clean wipe of both drives that had OSes on them (one was Vista RC1, the other XP). Installed XP, got everything in XP working fine, but when I boot, if the XP setup disk is not in a drive, I get a "Startup disk not found" error when I boot. I tried Fixboot with no success.

I am assuming that FixMBR is probably the way to solve this, but the warning is pretty darn scary, and the MS Knowledge base doesn't even indicate whether or not it will fix my problem.

One thing to note is that my OS is installed to the D drive (why it couldn't have made that C, I don't know, but before, it was E and worked fine, so I'm kind of stumped).

So, what's the best (and safest) way to do this. I have 4 hard drives total in the system...two SATA and two IDE. The OS is on the smaller of the SATA drives, if you need that.

 

[KGB]

Disconnect all drives except for the OS drive.
Load Windows, drivers, patches etc. THEN connect your other HDDs.

 

[Jman13]

Ok, as that will set me back another 3 to 4 hours (as I've already reinstalled a good size chunk of programs)...are there any other options here? I don't see how that solution would fix the problem anyway.... It would change the drive letter, but I'm not concerned so much with having the boot drive be D (as I said, my boot drive has been E for over a year), just that I need the computer to boot without the Windows setup disc in one of the CD drives.