[TriLUG] urg. wrong drive booting

[Rodent of Unusual Size]

i'm trying to zap my old laptop drive before returning it,
but the laptop always insists on booting from it when it's
in the superbay (hdc) instead of the normal disk (hda).

is there some command-line 'boot:' argument i can use to tell
linux to boot from hda instead of hdc?