Windows 7: Multiple XP , then Windows 7

Is there an easier way to accomplish this on my laptop? I took an XP image from the first primary partition and copied it to the 2nd partition. When I rebooted to the second partition I thought wow this is just great!. My only problem is when I found out that the working OS saw the booted 2nd partition as the next drive letter and not C drive . Argggg... How do I get around this? It's easy on my desktop PC because it has two drives and I keep XP on the 1st partition on both drives. But this seems to be a problem on the 1 drive laptop. People recommend on the internet to use EASYBCD but will this really solve this problem? What is the easiest solution? I am open to entering command line arguments. Could manually switching the "active" partition solve this problem using Gparted?

Once I get this solved I would then like to install Windows 7 and also protect the first two versions of XP. I already have my XP apps set on the first partition so I hope to keep that as-is. What is the best way? Any help would be appreciated.

Welcome to the forums, Point. Please fill in your system specs
I believe so. Other alterrnative is to edit the Boot.ini file, but that is dangerous and complicated. In 7 it is more simple using bcdedit (see below for reference)
FRom Microsoft help and support site: "When you use the Windows Disk Management snap-in tool to mark your primary partition as active, the computer may not start up if the partition marked as active does not contain the Windows boot files (or boot files for another operating system)."
Changing Active Partition Can Make Your System Unbootable
Please check here: Dual Boot Installation with Windows 7 and XP