a friend of mine has had an 80gig drive put in his pc and it has been partitioned as 25/55 and given the letters y: and z:. he already had 4 ide devices so i suspect that he had a new controller installed as well.

From what i can gather the drives are mounted as the 80gb Drive is mounted as drive 0, XP OS disk appears to be on drive 1 and data on drive 2.
Drive 0 is split into two partitions these are mounted within Windows XP Pro as y: and z:
Drive 1 is mounted as c: and Drive 2 is mounted as d:.
Drive 0 seems to contain an Active partition but none of the XP boot files drive 1 contains XP boot files but no Active partition. Hence removal of Drive 0 stops the system from booting.
he had the work done by some chap who charge him a load of dosh. what he wants is to use the new drive to back up his c and d drives and then disconnect it.

he can't tell me if the new drive was put on the original controller or not. but what confuses me is that he seemd to be booting off a drive with no OS can any one shed any light on this?
thanks