setting up seagate & western dig hd's in new build

[chunkstyle]

hey

i'm trying to get a new build going, and can't get at the utilities that are on the cd's that came with the hd's in order to
set the drives up. one's a seagate 40gb barracuda & the other's a western 160gb. neither hd came with a floppy -- just a cd. so i changed the boot sequence & made the cd-rom drive first in line, and the system does boot into caldera dr dos from there, but that's all. i have no idea what to do next. no documentation at all with the seagate (it was refurbished) & the western brochure says to make a boot floppy from the cd, but doesn't say how.

with this cd boot, the system seems to create a virtual y: drive with a bunch of files & directories on it, but none of the .exe files anywhere seem to do anything much.

thanks!

[trulad]

They will have to be FDISK and formatted. If you are going to install XP you can just set your CDROM as first boot device in the BIOS and boot with the XP cd and it will do all that for you. If not, you can boot with a Win.98 or ME startup disk and fdisk & format from that.
trulad

[chunkstyle]

i was going to put win xp on the first 20gb of the 40gb hd and put linux on the other 20gb. will booting from the xp cd allow me to do that? knowing microsoft, it'd really stick in their craw to format part of a hd for a competing os, so i don't know if the xp cd would allow for doing that. (perhaps i'm overly cynical in that opinion)

also -- the win xp i've got doesn't have service pack 1 nor 1a.
will that be an issue in the hd formatting process? the 2nd hd on the system will be a 160gb, but i was going to break it into partitions, so i don't know if that 137gb barrier will be a problem.

[glc]

There is no need to use the manufacturer's setup disk. Note that you need XP SP1 or 2K SP3 or 4 to see the full capacity of the 160, your best bet is leave that drive out till the OS is installed and properly patched before putting the 160 in.