Partition my D/drive

As far as I know you can just fdisk the new hd as a large primary parition and format it

W1Cheney, Use the win98 startup disk to bootup your computer. At the A:\ prompt, type FDISK, it will ask you support large drive or not. Answer <Yes> and go to select the 2G harddisk. Make the primary partition with 100%. Then it will not ask you to create extension partition. And DO NOT make the primary partition of your 2G harddisk to be "ACTIVE".

If your first 10G is 100% partitioned as primary and active as C drive. Your 2G harddisk will then be the primary non-active D drive.

Exit FDISK.

Go to format the D drive by
A:\format D: <enter>

See if this can be solved or not.     pslh

do as plsh said.  It sounds like when you created the drive of D you created it as an extended partition instead of a primary partition.

 I don't think you can make an extended partition on a drive without a primary partition.

1) You can create only extended logical partitions on a secondary hard disk with out needing a Primary partition.  You will loose about 8Meg of space on the drive since DOS reserves that for a primary partition if needed later.

2) If you create a primary partition on the second hard disk, the drive letter for the drive will be D: reguardless of how the first drive is partitioned (bumping your current D: partition if it exists).  If it is an extended logical partition, then it will be assigned a drive letter after the last drive letter on the first hard disk.

Thanks to all. I thought I knew a little something about computers until I came on this board. Now I don't think I know anything. Your help is great. Bill

Have we answered all your questions?  If not, elaborate.

Just remember that if you do create an extended partition on a hard disk, you still have to use FDISK to create one or more logical partitions within the extended partition, before the drive can be useful. A "naked" extended partition isn't ready to be used.

I looked at my D drive it shows that it has 2047k Pri DOS partition and 390k EXT. DOS partition already?? I guess I should take them out & start over? Does it look like there is something wrong with that. Thanks

W1Cheney, <<D drive it shows that it has 2047k Pri DOS partition and 390k EXT>>, When you start the FDISK, it ask you if you support large drive, but you answer "NO". Then when you partition your D drive, it takes the largest limit of Fat16 drive as 2047 as primary and the remaining spaces as extended partition.

(1) Go back to FDISK, Remove the logical partition, then remove the extended partition, then remove the primary partition of drive D.

(2) Restart the computer and go FDISK but say "YES" that you have to support large drive (i.e. drive over the limit of 2048MB), Go the create new primary partition with 100%.

Then there will be only one primary partition with FAT32.

pslh

    I have found the utility programs that the disk manufacturers furnish on-line to be very good at fixing such problems, Western Digital in particular. http://www.westerndigital.com/ Think Seagate, Maxtor, and Quantum have similar programs.

To clarify, there realy is no problem here.  Native Fdisk will handle the job just fine.  Just follow pslh's suggestion, and all with the new drive will be fine.  Just make sure you are selecting the correct drive through Fdisk.  (Option 5)

Not to say that Awmytie's suggestion is bad.  It is good for certain applications.

Thanks to all again. I've learned alot here.pslh's suggestion is the way its done. It had been partitioned before without support large drive.I repartitioned it with large drive support made it one primary partition. formatted it & loaded files. It works fine so far. I'm still not sure why I was getting a bad extented partition on it before? Unless you just can't have it set up with a primary & extented partition?? I accept the answer.