Mr O - sorry to be late on the scene, too busy blessing Reverends....................
See post 15 if it is a problem and I can share the way round it with you. It depends on what you mean by 'boots' - the 'boot' drive needs various files like NTDLR on it, but you tell the BIOS where to find it. If that drive has 'boot.ini' to select OS that is a 'boot' drive but if you simply have the one OS on a different drive that is another issue. As long as the machine knows 'where' to find the OS (and 'boot.ini' etc) all is well. If the 'C' drive has another drive letter, yes it can cause problems for poorly written installs that
default to the 'C' drive.
I am booting' satisfactorily now from the new SATA 'C' drive, but having removed an IDE 'C' drive now I no longer have a 'Drive 0' in BIOS, although my remaining IDE (Drive 1 in BIOS) is sorted into 'Drive 0' in Windows Disk Manager. I could swap around the SATA drives to make it Sata Drive 0 but cannot be bothered as it all works. Confusing innit?
I may well be forced to upgrade my d/top soon anyway as, although it matches
my personal 'declining speed', it is also starting to show its age and I suspect the processor will not handle a high-speed broadband (20+) if we manage to secure that.