xp install what did I miss

I had a hard drive go south from abuse or virus anyhow installed a brand new 80 gig hard drive , installed win xp pro on it and let it format drives 1part ntfs 1 part fat 32 & 3rd part ntfs. Would of assumed that this would be C , D, E, Ok I got I,J,K with I being the OS drive, so unchangeable in disk mgt. What it did was start with I because the C,D,E,F,G,H were set up for the USB removable device,storage ect . I can change like J drive to D drive in disk mgt however can not change the I drive (it is the OS drive) to C drive. Could this of possible been a virus in the BIOS? As that is only memory that the pc could of possible of had. Anyone got a fix out of this other than like ghosting to a drive then formatting or ghosting back to C drive after a reformat? I did install programs like Spybot Search And destroy on the fat 32 partion so when I try to run them unless I disconnect the storage drives Spy bot wont run as it cant find media.

To change the boot drive letter you're pretty much looking at a re-install from scratch. It's embedded in too many places.

You're right about the reasoning -- things like USB drives and ZIP drives can affect drive lettering during Setup. The solution is to disconnect those things during the initial install and then reconnect them afterwards.