Linux help(i think)

i recently installed Mandrake 9.0. i have 2 hard drives, a 80 gig and a 30 gig and decided to install the linux OS on the 30 gig which was formatted already and connected to the secondary IDE.(the primary IDE had the 80 gig along with my Windows XP OS and all my files)so i booted up and began to install mandrake 9.0 with both of my harddrives plugged in(pretty stupid i know, but my computer would'nt detect the 30 gig on its own). i got to the partitions section of the installation process and this displayed both of my drives,hdd and hda(i can't remember which one i chose). i chose to install it on the 30 gig which i intended to do and continued to create the linux partitions on the 30 gig drive, not touching anything of the 80 gig drive options. so it all successfully installed and i was pretty proud of myself. i browsed around linux for a while then i wanted to shutdown and reboot my windows xp harddrive(80gig). so i unplugged the 30 gig linux drive from the secondary controller and booted up again. the screen flickered, showed the pentium 4 logo(as per usual) and then stuffed up. the screen went black and a whole heap of 0's and 1's come up on screen and i can't do anything other than restart. u see the problem is that i can't boot from my windows drive anymore unless the linux drive is in the secondary IDE, which boots the linux menu at startup so i can choose to start windows XP or linux-startup is very unreliable, freezing here and there or taking a long time to get started-and once i do load windows, i have to unplug the linux hard drive or else windows goes haywire and crashes or slows down hard!my cd/RW also does not load sometimes with windows and stuffs up windows whenever i try to burn. naturally i would format the linux drive but i'm not sure if i'll be able to boot my windows drive without it, seeing as i can't now- all because of linux..curse that name! so can somone plz help me