He shouldn't need to remove the card reader guys. It's not considered a logical drive.. he probably just had a small error when he partitioned his HD and set it up as E: instead of C: Odds are the media card reader is only actually initialized once windows xp first starts up and detects it, douptful the actual installation sets it up as an actual logical drive to begin with.
Ok, what you need to do is delete the E partition, and then create a new one, it should default to C