HDD and BIOS Recognition ?

I have a Dell Dimension 4600 and I have just installed a new hard drive (old hdd dying) and placed the OS (XP Pro) on that drive... the new drive has been formatted and shows up as Drive F:... when I go into the BIOS to select this drive as the start up drive, I only have a choice of Drive C: for the start up boot drive... the BIOS does show the new hdd and the system does start up properly... however, I need to see if I can recover data from my old hdd partitioned as C: and if I connect the old C: drive up, the system tries to boot off of the old C: drive (old hdd has bad sectors that does not allow the OS to launch - blue screen on start up)... is there any way to get the BIOS to boot off of F: and ignore C:... if I unplug the old hdd and my external hdd, will the new hdd with the OS on it be recognized as C:... any help appreciated... thanks.

Yes. Just unplug the old HD and your external, plug in the new HD and connect it to your IDE 1 slot. Make sure the drive is set to master and change the jumper on the back on the previous hard drive over to slave. Connect the old HD either with the same cable so it's also connected to IDE 1 or connect it straight to the other IDE slot. Once the computer posts, you should have an option as to what xp to boot, the top 1 will be the master.

Then once in windows you should be able to just tranfer your files over to the new drive and get rid of the old one.

Yes you can.