Partition and Dual Boot Vol lll - the nitty gritty

As a change from trying to bend my mind to all the options and
strategies you've all been so helpful with,I yesterday took the first
faltering steps of the practical implementation - and installed the
new and second HDD.
The good news is the CMOS/BIOS can see the details of both new and old
HDDs.The bad news is that W98SE cannot see the new HDD in My Computer.
Is that perhaps because it's not partitioned/formatted yet or for some
other reason.
If the former do we not need a bootable FD to partition/format the new
HDD.Because the second lot of bad news is that my FD drive now won't
work.It's still there in My Computer and on the Desktop and in Device
Manager but when you click on it nothing happens and eventually a big
red cross appears saying 'Drive A not accessible'.
Is this perhaps because we have too many drives on the system or for
some other reason.We do now have 5 drives - 2xHDD,aFD, a Iomega
Zip,and a DVD/CD ROM and all appear on the CMOS list.
Before I fitted the new HDD (and lost the A: drive) I had fiddled with
the Emergency FD I made several years ago but never needed to use.
I used it several days ago to try to answer a pmj question about a
hidden partition and used FDisk and it seemed to work ok.Yesterday
(before I added the HDD) I tried it again in DOS and it came up with a
load of error messages too fast to read and I couldn't change drives
from A to C.So I tried to make a new Emergency FD from Windows and
failed cos it wanted the W98SE CD installed which as regular readers
will know we do not have!How I made the other Emergency FD several
years ago I do not Know.So head banging time with Bootable FDs but
there's nothing can be done on that till we get the A drive back.
You were both forecasting that as soon as we got started with the
practicalities of this project there would be problems.
I have just confirmed that in spades.Help please.
PS On the hidden partition question the info on the old HDD from FDisk
was'Partition C1 Status A Type PRI DOS Label WIN98_SE Mbytes 39080
System FAT32 Usage 100%' Does this info tell us unequivocally whether
we have a hidden partition or not? (aren't hidden partitions hidden?).

Hawkeye
.

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