Hi, Brian.
It's not as simple as that. Every HD has an MBR - that's where the
partition table is, even if the HD is not used for booting. What you must
add is a boot sector that knows to look for the "system files" - and the
system files themselves (ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini). These files
must be in the first partition of the first physical HD, and that partition
must be primary and active (bootable). The C: and E: labels are not
permanent, but are re-assigned by the BIOS each time you boot, depending on
the physical drives that it finds when it detects the hardware during boot -
before it ever begins to load Windows.
If you can find a way (using Partition Magic or something similar) to shrink
your present Drive E: and move it away from the front of that physical
drive, then you can create a new (even the minimal 8 MB will work) primary
partition there, make it Active, and format it. Then you can install the
boot sector and system files there by booting from the WinXP CD-ROM and
running the Repair procedure.
Once all this has been done, when your computer reboots, it will detect the
new boot sector on the small partition it will label C:, which will find
C:\ntldr, which will look in C:\boot.ini, which will tell it where (drive #
and partition #) to find the rest of WinXP, which C:\ntdetect.com will then
load.
Whether the WinXP boot volume will still be E: depends on some things you
didn't tell us, such as how many volumes (primary partitions and logical
drives in extended partitions) are on each of your HDs, and which "drive"
letter is assigned to each.
Sorry, no email response. Although the Web-based interface calls this a
Community, it's still a newsgroup. We are NOT MS Tech Support. We are just
users like you, helping each other. In email, only one or two people can
benefit. In a newsgroup, thousands can benefit. And wrong answers can be
corrected by other readers. Post your question here; come back here for
your answers. ;<)
RC
What I'm wanting to do is get rid