here's the deal...

[AlwaysUp]

Here is the deal...I bought a 3.2 Gb WD Caviar hdd for a friend off ebay. It is going into a machine that has a 884 Mb hdd. This machine was an old Win 3.1 machine upgraded to Win 95. The file format is FAT16. Well I get the hdd and take it over and install. During bootup the system sees Primary Master -old hdd.
Primary Slave - CD-Rom. But the Secondary Master doesn;t even try to detect...it just jumps to Secondary -slave which there is none. I can go into BIOS setup and Auto Detect the drive sometimes...and sometimes not. Thus no Drive letter assigned....I viewed partitions. It has 1 Primary Dos partition FAT32. I deleted. Now I tried to use a FAT16 to FAT 32 drive conversion progie (cvt.exe) Get error that Version of DOS is too old. Can DOS be upgraded?

[ktkendall]

I've successfully used Norton Ghost 2001 to clone an old fat16 win95 850Meg hd over to a new 40G drive for one customer. Then I got him up and running in his new box and then proceeded to do the win 98 upgrade! There is a box I checked under options that automatically converts fat16 to fat 32 right along with the cloning process, it really worked great.

[AlwaysUp]

Thanks,ktkendall; but this guy is a friend and doesn't have the resources to purchase software and my budget won't allow me to either.

[ktkendall]

You can get it cheap now because it is an old version, and in fact I even got a copy of ghost 2002 with a new MOBO I bought a couple of months ago. Is it win95 OS2, cause if it's not then it still won't go beyond fat16, I can't remember the numbers you are looking for when you check the version but you have to be OS2 which was the second release of win95 to even be able to go fat32 and thus be able to use beyond 2G of that new drive.

[ktkendall]

UPDATE;
I just read your post a bit closer and you really don"t want cdrom as primary slave. Ideally if you are planning on keeping both HD's in that sys just to give him more storage then for better preformance you want to go with the HD's as master/slave primary and put the cdrom as secondary master. In BIOS set them all to auto except secondary slave to none, this will just save a little boot time. It does sound like either the jumpers are incorrect though or the HD you got is not very healthy though. You do have to really watch those old 2 and 3 G used HD's. Ideally I would clone that old 850M onto that new one and just take that 850 out of the sys. It will really drag things down.