question about adding second hd

[mouseball]

i have never done this so i wanna know before i screw up...

if i have a second hd and i install the hardware (power, cables, jumpers, etc) correctly, setup all the master-slave things to auto detect, and i boot up xp, what will xp do? will xp magically (automatically) assign a new drive letter to it? or do i have to do some software configurations with fdisk/format first?

and one more thing. is it possible combine 2 physical hds into one logical partition, so that windows recognizes it as only a c:? it might sound weird, but i'm just curious...

[geoscomp]

With XP you should be able to install the drive..assuming the master/slave things you talked about, and assuming the bios is set to autodetect the drive..and then format it from administrative tools in the control panel. reboot and windows will assign a drive letter. Maybe someone else knows about a drive spanning overlay of some sort, but I have never seen anything that would allow you to create that kind of primary partition, and can't quite figure out why you would want to.

[confus-ed]

Originally posted by mouseball
...and one more thing. is it possible combine 2 physical hds into one logical partition, so that windows recognizes it as only a c:? it might sound weird, but i'm just curious...

Geoscomp has answered part one for you ... so for part two what about dynamic disks ?
Here's all about them ! (most labelled w2k, but the same applies with xp)

[silencio]

Originally posted by mouseball
i
and one more thing. is it possible combine 2 physical hds into one logical partition, so that windows recognizes it as only a c:? it might sound weird, but i'm just curious...

If you have a RAID controller on your motherboard you can combine the two drives into one partition. As a RAID 0 set you'll get a partition twice the size of the smallest drive but lose everthing if a single drive fails. If you mirror them you'll have the entire capacity of the smallest drive and have a backup drive if one dies. In order to do this you'd have to backup and wipe the existing drives then restore/reinstall or, just wipe them and reinstall if you don't care about any of the data.