i just put in a new drive in windows xp. it's an ibm 60 gig deskstar. i have it all set up and it's working...kinda. a couple things have came up. first, when i went to format the drive, at the end of the format it said it was too big for fat 32 and didn't let me label the drive from the dos prompt. i renamed it from windows, but why would it do that? it didn't do that in win2k and it's the same drive, but a replacement. second thing is that now when i boot up it takes about 20 seconds longer than when i didn't have the second drive installed. any help on either of those problems would be greatly appreciated

First of all you need to use NTFS in order to have a single partition on it since FAT32 is pretty outdated and doesn't support drives that large. Also, if you have formatted it as NTFS you cannot access it from DOS, which would include labeling it. I would also recommend putting the drives on their own channel; one on the primary IDE as a master, and the other on the secondary. Having them both together slows things down since only one drive can be active at a time.

fat 32 does support it. i had the same drive setup before it went bad.

also. it setup for fat 32 was fine using a disk utility. it's when i tried to format through the dos shell it got to 99% and then when it was going to finish it gave the partition size as 58 some-odd gigs and really only 57.7 or so should be usable. at least that's how it was last time

If you're set on using FAT32 for your drive, don't format it from within Wix XP. Boot with a Win98 disk, use FDISK to remove and recreate the partition, and format it from a real DOS prompt. Or better yet, use GDISK to do everything in less than 30 seconds: GDISK 2 /del /all GDISK 2 /cre /pri /for /q /v:DISK_NAME You can download GDISK.exe from here: http://www.drd.dyndns.org/index2.html. Click SOFTWARE, then click the folder icon next to "How-To: Partitioning with Symantec's GDISK." Slap it on any decent DOS bootdisk and you're in business.