Problem solved...or so I think. I found a neat little utility on the Maxtor Hard drive website called "BigDriveEnabler.exe". It's not manufacturer-specific apparently, because I downloaded and ran...

Ah...thanks! I was driving myself nuts looking for a way to make that disk. :o
*thoroughly embarassed now* LOL

I got the FDISK.exe program from a Win ME Rescue Disk...haven't figured out how to make the same type of disk in Win XP. Any ideas? OK, so, I'm going to take your advice and clear the new drive...

To make a very long story sort of short, I messed up big-time! :( I just installed a new 200 GB hard drive as master (the comp. recognized it as F drive) and used my old 80 GB drive as slave...