I need some advice:

History:
Back in early May, I bought a 10 gb Maxtor hard drive.  The sticker on the
front of the box said, "Windows 95 required.  See back of box for details."
Blinded by all that space, and UltraDMA 33, too, I didn't bother to turn the
box over until I got home.  Bad move.  It said, "Installing as a boot drive
requires the full installation set of Windows 95 or higher (not an
upgrade)..."  Oops.  (I'm running Windows 95 with Service Pack 1, upgraded
from Win 3.1.)  I checked with Maxtor, and they stuck by their story.
Evidently Microsoft doesn't provide any way to access disks larger than 8.4
gb if you go the upgrade route.

I decided to press on.  I created five partitions (four 2.1 gb and one to
fill the balance), formatted them, and transferred the old C: stuff to the
new one.  I then set up the old drive for archives.  There haven't been any
difficulties with the setup, but then the disk is pretty much empty.  I've
run SiSoft Sandra, ScanDisk (normal and thorough), Disk Defragmenter and
Norton SystemWorks -- no problem.  So far, so good.

Then last week I installed Partition Magic 4.0 to prepare for Red Hat Linux
6.0.  PM says I am trying to access more than 1023 cylinders and that is not
good. Oops again.

Plans under consideration:
1.  Use Partition Magic to create a Linux root, set up some DOS/Windows
partitions being careful to keep them in the first 1023 cylinders, and give
Linux the rest of the space. The old drive would continue to be the archive.
(No further cash outlay. This is, after all, just a hobby.)
2.  The Maxtor box also says that I could use the new drive as a non-Boot
drive, which means that I could set up my old drive as the boot drive.  It
is a 1.7 gb Fujitsu ATA2 drive. (Performance hit, and I lose having the
archive on a separate disk.)
3.  Buy a full install of Windows 95 or 98.  (That is 30+ six packs of the
good stuff.)
Other factors:
1. The goal is to surf, run some WIndows-specific applications, and mess
around with Linux (brain exercise).
2. The motherboard is a FIC VA-503+ with a recent BIOS and an AMD K2-300 --
no problem there.
3. Backup isn't any big deal, but reconfiguration is an annoyance that I'd
like to avoid.
4. I've also got an old 260 mb drive that I could install to simplify
swapping files.
5. I also have Maxtor's MUD program which can be used to restore the drive
to its fresh-from-the-factory condition.

What's the best way to proceed?  Or is there a better way?
TIA.
-- Carroll

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