unable to boot to drine C: stand alone

[JIm]

I had xp installed on my hard drive but it was called E:
and sometimes when I went to install other software (for
insytance games) they wouldn't install because they looked
for drive C: to install to. SO I put another identical 80
gig hard drive on my computer and made it a master on IDE
1, leaving E: as a slave on IDE 1. From there I used my xp
CD to format C: as C: and put a fresh copy of XP on it. Now
I have gotten all the files and settings I need from E: and
want to remove it from my computer, but when I did, my
system wouldn't boot, coming up with some strange looking
black screen saying I needed a system disk. When I loaded
system tools and did a disk part info search on my
computer, it says that C: is the boot disk, and E: is the
system disk. How can I make C: the boot and system disk so
whem E: is removed, my system will boot into the Windows I
have installed on C:?

..

 

[MacArthur]

I suspect you are still booting from E: XP unlike Win9x doesn't have
to boot from C. Your boot.ini which is a hidden file in your root
directory points to the boot drive.

It will look lsomething like this:
[boot loader]
timeout=10
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /fastdetect