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...