What is your motherboard? If you can tell me that I maybe able to direct you further. Sometimes the boot order settings are a bit hidden. I also had a case on an older system where it recognized drives as they were attached, ( Its primary drive had its power cable come a bit loose so the system assumed that its data drive was the primary. I had to plug in one drive at a time to get the boot order correct, as the CMOS had no setting for boot order).
By the way, If your system boots from "drive F", it would become Drive C. CMOS controls what drive the system boots from and that will assign the correct drive letter to it. Your data drives can have their drive letters assignment put back to normal in the computer management control panel, (under Admin tools control panel icon), once you're booting up normally with everything connected.
Just as a test, if you know which drive is which, try to disconnect all but your primary C drive. Your XP should then start ok, but you would not have access to your data drives, (obviously)...
Hope this helps...