I would suggest that you unplug your current C drive (win 98) from the data cable and set the jumpers on the Seagate as solo master-attach it to the end of the data cable. On boot enter your BIOS and set it to boot first to the CD in which you'll have the Win XP disk.  The disk will partition and format the drive, and do the installation.  The portion where you have data on the Seagate will stay the D drive when you're done because the partition with the OS will be C.  You can install to the new partition after the CD has partitioned and reformatted. YOu may want to format as FAT32 since your other drives are that.  You can, if you like, format as NTSF. Do all the XP updates before you start installing anything except the network interfeace card which you'll need to get to the Windows update site.

>Hi,
>
>Please, I need some guidance with this fiasco.
>
>I've just installed a new hdd as the slave.  It's recognized in the bios as
>a slave on the Primary (I can't believe it, but I know what that means)
>
>I want to partition it and load XP Pro, then make it the boot device.  I
>have XP Pro CD and the SP1 CD from M$ (they say it's equivalent to SP1a).
>
>The drive is a Seagate barracuda, 80GB, ATA.  I tried to use the bundled
>DiscWizard, but it keeps freezing; tried to find a fix on Seagate's site,
>but it's too difficult.  The wizard is supposed to partition, etc, and make
>life easy, but unfortunately...
>OTOH, luckily there's ya'all  :)
>
>My current drive is running 98se on the C:\ and all data and programs are
>on the D:\.  The cd roms are on the E and F.  This particular 98se is a
>reinstall from the 98se disc.  I want to keep the current hdd as is, just
>add this new hdd and make it the boot OS.
>
>(This may sound dumb, but how does my system know what letters to give the
>new hard drive when I tell it to format and partition and all that?  It's
>sort of like chicken and egg time to me.)
>


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