PE> why do I want LBA instead of non-LBA anyway?

The only real reason for enabling LBA on a large drive like that is that that
allows you to use the whole drive with plain old booted DOS and FAT partitions.

Tho you can certainly make a case for always installing all large
drives with LBA enabled, even when you plan to only use it with OS/2
and HPFS partitions, mainly because you then have more convenient
flexibility later if you choose to say change one of the HPFS partitions
into a FAT and run plain booted DOS on it. Its just easier if its already
been installed in the cmos with LBA enabled. And with someone like you
who may forget that fine detail between now and then, the drive will
be in the best config, whatever you do in the future with it.

Strictly speaking you should always install a drive using the
auto identify and select the mode you want to use, LBA in this
case, in that install. THEN freshly FDISK etc the whole drive
and install/copy what data you want onto that drive.

When you dont have the flexibility you currently do on extra mostly empty
drives, it is possible with some care to install a large drive on a motherboard
which does not support LBA, move it to one which does, and enable LBA.

Depending on the PARTICULAR drive, that may or may not change the
mapping of the CHS values to logical blocks to make the directory
structures etc go bye bye, and its worth trying carefully if you
cant do it the safer way with a full tape backup or spare drives etc.

And note that this business about enabling LBA later ONLY applys
to an OS/2 formatted drive, the story is completely different with a
large drive that you have formatted for plain old DOS without using LBA.
@EOT:

---