*sigh*
The wrong slave HD was in the tower... The hard drives must of got mixed up last night...
anyway- I swapped HD-b around and got the same problem. I rang my brother and told him how I was going... he said to boot from the Win98 boot disk that was here and run fdisk, delete the partitions and then throw in the installation CD for the OS
It seems to be installing fine now- and it saw both 3gb harddrive and 16gb harddrive when it asked me where I wanted to place the OS... which is a good thing
Thanks for the help anyway! I really appreciate the time you took to help me
Problem resolved