>Thanks for all the info. I don't need something like this right now, but, I may remove the first smaller drive in the near future, so... I may bother you with more questions then. Thanks again.
Actually, I just ran into an entry in the MSKB for NT. Q114841 says that NT will allow you to use an NTFS disk volume as big as 7.8GB for your system partition, as long as your disk BIOS supports extended sector translation (during the boot process, the bootstrap loader in the MBR has to make use of the BIOS INT13 code to access the hard drive; that sets the limit on how big a partition can be without the BIOS getting confused.) If extended sector translation is available in the BIOS, the boot code can handle a bigger partition. INT13 extended sector translation is available in many newer motherboard BIOSes, as well as on most SCSI adapters with their own BIOS extensions.
You still can't create an NTFS partition >4GB during NT's install; that's because the drive is initially created as FAT16 and then converted. If you create the NTFS partition outside of NT install (using PM or NT Disk Administrator), you bump your head against the INT13 data structures used by the BIOS interface (sector addresses are represented in 24 bits, with a maximum of 256 heads * 1024 tracks/head * 63 sectors/track, and a standard disk sector of 512 bytes.) With a little luck, you're OK.
Another recent entry, Q138364, describes the NT partitioning rules during setup.
Ed
>
>PS I should have asked you before setting up the partitions on my drives. I see now that it was not the best choice. :(
>
When all else fails, RTFF (Read That Fine FAQ). The latest release of the
NT FAQ pointed to the updated MSKB articles.
>>Using just NT, AFAIK, no. The trick I use is to set up a tiny (well, maybe 20-30MB) primary partition with DOS on it to serve as the home for the boot loader, and then set up an extended partition as big as I need and allocate a logical drive and format it as NTFS using Partition Magic (shameless endorsement - if you set up many systems, you desperately need a copy of Partition Magic! PowerQuest has a great product there, with a bunch of nice utilities, including a boot manager that makes dual boot setups much easier when you started with just NT and then want to add something later. And their DriveCopy utility is great, too, when switching to a new, larger drive - it'll take all the partitions from your old drive, resize them where aprropriate (works with FAT and NTFS for this, and it understands the system partition/boot partition issues) and migrate them to the new drive, adjusting allocation and drive layout as needed. I'm a big fan.)
>>
>>Ed
