new HD not showing up as C

I just installed a SATA HD. I took out the old drive which had windows but kept in another drive which used to be my D drive. I installed windows on the new drive but now windows took my old D drive and made it the C drive while setting the SATA drive (which windows is installed on) to some other letter.

I want the SATA drive to be my C drive.

Is this possible without having to reinstall?

Is it actually booting from the C: or the D: drive?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q223188/

It's not a good idea to do that though, but it should work. However, you may need to change the boot loader (boot.ini) to reflect disk(0) instead of disk(1). I'm actually not sure how XP assigns drives. All of the boot files may be on disk C: as well, though I don't think so (depends on if it's booting from there or not). If that's the case, you'll need to copy boot.ini, msdos.sys, io.sys, and ntldr to the other drive.

In the future, change your SATA drive to NONE in the BIOS to get Windows to properly boot from and name an SATA drive. You could try that first to see if the drive letters change, but I doubt they will. XP *always* gives preference to PATA drives. I don't know why.

it is definitely booting from the SATA drive because the other drive doesn't have windows installed

take out you d drive boot leave your sata drive boot up a few tines wih your sata drive then install your other drive. the best way of doing it was to only have connected your sata drive install os on it then boot it up after install your other hdd or you could try right click my computer go to manage , then a new window opens go to disk management the you got to the display right click select change drive letter

it is definitely booting from the SATA drive because the other drive doesn't have windows installed
That doesn't mean anything. The boot drive can be different from the Windows drive.

what ever you do dont change you boot ini file if you do it wont find your system files.

i just decided to leave it. All of the system pointers are pointing to the J drive (the SATA drive)

thanks for the advice though

if you installed to the SATA drive but it had your old drive set as C, then all the boot/startup files would probably get installed on C and your windows partition would be installed on the SATA. If you were to take out the old drive, format/install windows on the SATA, then add the old drive later, I'm sure the SATA would end up as C

i just decided to leave it. All of the system pointers are pointing to the J drive (the SATA drive)

thanks for the advice though
just change it via windows use my steps.