A mysterious boot problem

Hello....I'll try to keep this as clear and concise as I can, but no promises. This is possbly my last hope!!! I spent 10 hours messing with this yesterday. I know if I re-install xp, I think it might work.

Basically, a long story short.....enter hard drive 1 and 2. installed xp pro on 1..turned out to be too noisy, so ghosted it to 2. deleted xp and reformatted 1 and used it as a storage drive. wanted to take out 1 (it was only 150GB, but 15000 rpm...hence the noise) and put in a sata blu-ray burner (I bought it really really cheap when circuit city was going out of business 3 years ago and never got around to it until yesterday). it would not boot..took me about 8 hours to figure this out on my own. tried modifying and rebuilding the bootcfg and no success. can't find any boot file on 1 even within hidden files and I even got inside system volume on 1.

As long as I keep 1 in, it will boot just fine AND it HAS to be the first drive in BIOS for some crazy reason even though there's no OS on it. If the drive 1 is not #1 in the BIOS, IT WILL NOT BOOT (Disk system failure blah blah)...as soon as I take it out, no boot (Disk system failure blah blah blah). I could easily add another sata pci card to accomodate the blu-ray, but I just want to know why this is happening. I do not want drive 1 in there. I have a 2TB drive I can add and use as an additional storage. It makes no sense.

The guy at BestBuy suggested that maybe I could install linux and tried to gain control of the boot sector, but I have no experience with linux and frankly I don't want to make it worse. I can still boot ok with 1 in and use my pc fine. I am on it right now in fact. I am trying to avoid re-installing because it just takes foooorrreeevvvveeerr. I tried to be concise and succint, but not sure if it worked. And, yes, I don't really need a blu-ray burner, but my dvd burner just went bad, but I need an optical drive anyways, so there.... It really doesn't matter what I am adding, I CANNOT take out drive 1. Please help me!