Just got my new Western Digital 200 Gb hard drive working--finally. It came with its own installation program, to partition and format the drive after it is installed. The program turned out not to be very helpful. The quick-install book said "If your drive is > 137 Gb, you will need to boot to DOS to take advantage of the additional space". I considered this a downer, since I never boot to DOS, so I was already in unfamiliar territory.
After a mis-start or two, I successfully booted to DOS from their CD (which included the Caldera DOS clone). But at the end of the boot sequence, there were 4 lines that all said "Invalid filename or blah". And nothing else happened. I tried looking for an EXE to type in, but that didn't yield any progress, either.
So then I tried making a boot diskette--first time I've touched a diskette in years--but that led to exactly the same result. So then I went to their website, which was not helpful at all, including using special non-standard search syntax. I got nowhere with that.
After fumbling around some more, including multiple, tedious reboots and looking at Device Manager, I somehow stumbled on the idea of maybe seeing if the Windows version of the install utility might work, despite the disclaimer. Lo and behold, it appeared to. Except that it hung up on partitioning--no progress, no error, just indefinite hang (I left it overnight, just to be sure).
I hung it up for the night. The next day, I decided to search for "can't boot to DOS". That yielded a lucky break--more chance than the fruit of well-targeted searching--that made me think of something that, if I were even a third-rate sysadmin, would have been obvious: Drive Manager.
I fired up XP's built-in Drive Manager, and from then on, it was smooth sailing. Drive Manager did find existing partitions from the WD utility. I deleted those, then created one big partition, then formatted it, and voila!
My analysis is that WD was trying to shield less technical (most) users from the need to access Drive Manager, and further assuming that anyone who did need to access it would know about it, and perhaps folded in there was an outdated assumption that anyone buying a > 137 Gb drive most likely fell into the latter category.
5:38:23 PM 
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