Switch master slave drives in laptop how to

[rRed]

Hello,
I'm having an issue with a virus, I've deleted the partition with Windows on it but when I try to reinstall it can't see my hard drive.
I have a Dell Vostro 1710 laptop with 2 hard drives (SATA) so I thought if I could run linux temporarily off the 2nd drive I could reformat the entire 1st drive, but I don't know how to swap the master and slave drives in a laptop, Is it possible to do without opening it up?
Please be noob-friendly with your answer, I know more about pc's than my friends but that's not saying much.. ") Thanks.

 

[house70]

If the PC has 2 HDDs, you ought to be able to select the boot order and pick the HDD you want to boot first from. Be aware, you will need a bootable OS on the other HDD in order to be able to boot from it.
I would do this differently, though. I would download killdisk and make a bootable cd with it. Insert the cd and power up the laptop, choose cd-rom as the first bootable device, boot from cd into killdisk, run killdisk on the HDD that you want to install Windows on, then insert Windows CD and boot from it. Continue installation. Windows should see the HDD unformatted; pick that for installation and format and install .