installed new dlave HD, but

[DarkViper]

something i think went weird.
i started off with
A:\ (floppy)
C:\ (physical)
D:\ (CD ROM)

and when i plugged this used HDD that i got from a freidn a long time ago it automatically detected, built the driver base, and all of a sudden i got this
A:\ (floppy)
C:\ (physical)
D:\ (physical) LABEL: PART1NOV00
E:\ (physical) LABEL: PART2NOV00
F:\ (CD ROM)

my CDROM drive got bumped up 2 letters (though works normally) and i got 2, count em, 2 extra drive letters here, what in gods name happened? and should i format them both? What should i do, ones got windows98 installed on it as well, im kind of afraid its going to conflict with my win98.

please help me in this dilema!

[Salem]

So it's got 2 partitions on it, each formatted as a DOS disk (hence 2 disks).

> nes got windows98 installed on it as well, im kind of afraid its going to conflict with my win98.
Unlikely if the drive is acting as a slave. I think you'd need a boot manager to boot the OS on the slave disk.

If all you want is a nice new disk with a single partition which you can then format as D:, then use 'fdisk' to delete and re-create the partitions on the slave disk, then use the format command to format D:

If you want to play really safe, then create a boot floppy with fdisk and format on it, then make your new disk the primary (and sole) hard disk in your system. From the "A:\>" prompt, you can then do fdisk and format on the hard disk.

[DarkViper]

its asks me if i want to enable "Large Disk Support" and gives me a large warning about it.

Your computer has a disk larger than 512 MB. This version of Windows
includes improved support for large disks, resulting in more efficient
use of disk space on large drives, and allowing disks over 2 GB to be
formatted as a single drive.

IMPORTANT: If you enable large disk support and create any new drives on this
disk, you will not be able to access the new drive(s) using other operating
systems, including some versions of Windows 95 and Windows NT, as well as
earlier versions of Windows and MS-DOS. In addition, disk utilities that
were not designed explicitly for the FAT32 file system will not be able
to work with this disk. If you need to access this disk with other operating
systems or older disk utilities, do not enable large drive support.

what should i do here?

[Salem]

Say yes I would imagine

Unless the warning about sharing and backward compatibility really matters to you.

[PostCode]

The reason if is going to D:and moving your CD-ROM drive to another drive letter is because it is a physical hard drive. Your CD-ROM is an ATAPI device and NOT a form of storage. This is the way the ATA standard works.

As for the large disk support, this is used for FAT32 partitions. If you say No to this, then only FAT16 partitions will be created. If you say Yes, then FAT32 partitions will be created. Decide before you create the paritions if you want to have FAT16 or FAT32. If the drive in question, in this case the drive containing two partitions, is larger than 2GB in size, then tell it Yes and create one FAT32 partition. If it less than 2GB but greater than 500MB then I highly suggest you also use FAT32 because the block size will be smaller thus you will get more efficient use of the space on the drive. The smaller the block size, the more efficient use of drive space.

[DarkViper]

ok, thank you Salem and postCode, that came in very handy.

[PostCode]

Your second hard drive is just that. A seperate hard drive. You can't combine it with another drive like this. Once you have removed both partitions on the second drive and recreated one, this that drive will show up as D:. There is no way around this unless you use some sort of RAID array to perform this. You can't do this without a RAID controller or a operating system that will do it with software. After you have deleted both partitions and created a new one on the second drive, then this is what it'll look like:

c:\ (first physical drive - Primary master)
d:\ (second physical drive)
e:\ (CD-ROM drive)