Wiping my Win2K partition?
 

My harddrive setup is like this at the moment
hda1: Win2K Fat32
hda2: Fat32 partition
hdb1: ext3 partition
hdb2: RH8

I have no use for the Win2K partition at all anymore so I guess I could fdisk hda1 and hda2 and convert the partitions to ext3, leave everything else as is and continue to use my existing installation.
But wouldn't it be better to physically swap the drives, making hdb becoming hda or wouldn't that make any difference? (both are 7200 rpm drives but hdb has 8MB cache and is slightly faster)

And if I did that, would I only have to change a few entries to grub.conf and fstab or are there other things to take into consideration as well?

One thing I probably will be stuck with is that RH8 will alwas be on the second partition of the WD 80GB drive, but I'd like to swap in a new drive probably a WD 200GB and I'd like to make the setup as smooth as possible.

There wouldn't be any performance difference between leaving it as hdb and moving it to hda.

If you do move it, be sure to have a rescue disk handy, just in case. Not only will you need to edit fstab and grub.conf, but you'll need to set GRUB onto the MBR of the now hda.

If you leave the drive as hdb, you'll need to leave the hda in for it to call up GRUB.

Search Google for more info on GRUB.

If you are going to put in a 200GB drive any way then just remove both the old drives and install your OS on it. After the install just put hdb back in and mount it's partitions so you can copy the data to the new drive and then format the old one.

Ok thanks, I'll just wipe Windows off hda1, convert the partition to ext3 and leave all the rest as is ....
When I have my new drive I'll re-install the os (will be a good opportunity to try out RH9) and transfer my data as suggested.

won't erasing hda1 delete the MBR ?

No, the master boot record is a reserved space totally separated from any other partition on the drive.
That's why when you want to completely fdisk a hard drive you also have to fdisk /mbr.