BIOS and Hard Drive Recognition ?

[tapar1]

I have a Dell Dimension 4600 and I have just installed a new hard drive (old hdd dying) and placed the OS (XP) on that drive... the new drive has been formatted 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:... thanks.

 

[tapar1]

after some further google searching on the topic, it appears the easiest thing to do is to unplug my old hdd and external hdd and wipe the new hdd clean and start all over again...