Drive installation letter assignments in clean install.?

Problem. Put together new system, mobo, processor, ram and hd. Brought forward my optical drives. Installation is that opticals are on the eide channel and the sata hd is on the sata channel running native ide mode since only one hd being installed. Went to install os and it was installed on the "F" drive. As it sits now, the "C" drive is the memory card reader, recognized as removable storage, the opticals are "D" and "E" and the hd is "F". Obviously I can't remove the opticals since I need them to install os, so not sure what I can do. I keep getting errors "disk not found" at various times, usually when running a program and having it open a file or directory, but not all programs, so not really thinking it's a issue. I need to be able to install os so it's on the "C" drive, but at a loss as to how to do it. Obviously, easy to unplug the media card reader before clean install, but would need to change the channel of the opticals on the ide or get bios to recognize the sata channel 0 as the first so as to assign the "C" drive letter to the hd. Mobo is gigabyte ma78lmt-s2.

Oh and minus points to anyone that mentions linux as I believe I would experience the same problem.