i'll try to take you step by step through my "learning experience" brief but another example of why windows sucks .. ass.
my system, a 1.3 ghz athlon thunderbird running win98se.. i have a hard drive and a cd-rom drive, each on their own ata channels..
naturally, win98 crashes daily, so i want to improve stabilty. -- i acquire winxp professional from a "friend" and take the 10gb maxtor ata/66 drive that i pulled from my stock G4/400 sawtooth to install xp on.. it was formatted with the HFS+ file system.
so, i configured it to slave and put it on the second channel (shared with the cd-rom drive). that was a mistake. so, i put it on the first channel (something that i was trying to avoid, since it'll slow down my first hard drive (of ATA/100 ilk) to that of the second (66).
problem is, although the computer recognizes the drive in the bios and in windows, but it won't assgign the drive a letter, and as such i cannot reformat the drive (i know of no windows-based way to format a drive, just DOS)
so what do i do? pop it in my mac, format it for fat32 (drive flawlessly recognized and formatted by the OS) and in under 45 seconds my macintosh has demonstrated that it kicks windows' ass.
