250 GB Hard Drive Upgrade for the Gaming Box, Area 51

I'm working with Blake on upgrading the gaming computer, Area 51, by adding a 250 GB hard drive, a Western Digital Caviar SE (7200 RPM) Model WD2500JBRTL with 30-day installation support and 1 year warranty, starting today, I hope.

We plucked the 15 MB boot drive, and left the 80 GB data drive installed as the slave. The hardware installation went smoothly and the BIOS recognized the unformatted drive as the new master on the next boot.

No operating system, of course, so it's time to install Windows XP. Here's the rub: pre-service pack, for both 2000 and XP, Windows can't recognize a volume larger than 137 GB. So, we boot from the handy Western Digital Installer CD, which allows me to format the entire volume. Tech note: the CD boots to DR-DOS and runs some nifty batch files which install the required drivers. Then, you use the keyboard to run a virtual GUI environment to format the drive with FAT 16, FAT 32, or NTFS partitions.

Here's what I did:

• Created a 4.2 GB FAT 16 partition for Windows 2000 (32 K allocation blocks, I believe).
• Devoted the remaining 245 or so GB to an NTFS partition (4 K blocks).

This way, after I install Win2K on the small (4.2 GB) boot partition, I can install

I set up Windows 2000 with a trivial password (admin/admin) and set up my personal account.

Windows XP Pro, New Installation advanced setup: Advanced Options, Choose partition and drive letter; Don't upgrade partition to NTFS (it already is)