Drive letter assignments after new drive install

For various reasons I had to replace the 40GB drive that was originally ordered in my new Dell 8200 with a 120GB drive. I'm one of those who always had partitioned drives - one for software, and one or more partitions for data, Photoshop scratch disks, etc. So I took the opportunity with the new blank disk to partition the drive the way I wanted it from the beginning (rather than use Partition Magic later on).

Everything went fine, except that I ended up with hard drives mapping to drives F, G, and H. My internal ZIP was assigned C, DVD was D, and CD-RW was E. I changed the drive letters on all but the system (F) drive hoping to get the system drive mapped back to C when I rebooted (Win XP apparently won't let you change the drive letter of the system disk).

Dell doesn't support partitioned drives, and in fact their tech support guys don't really know much about the whole process. So they couldn't answer my question: is there a way to get the system drive partition from F back to C? If I reinstall Win XP and go through the partitioning process again, is there something I can do to make my 3 hard drive partitions map to C, D, and E?

From a technical standpoint, I guess it doesn't matter whether the system drive is C, D, or X. But I've had 17 years of using C as the main hard drive, so it's habit. And also, just about every program install out there defaults to C, so I'd have to change that every time I install something.

Is there something obvious I'm missing here? Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Pat