1.) i have two hard drives: one with windows on it and the other a storage drive, will the
storage drive be affected if i format the one with windows on it and reinstall windows? will windows demand that i reformat the storage drive or anything wierd like that? i know this probably sounds like a dumb question but i just wanna be sure so i dont loose my stuff.

2.) whats the point of specifying a partition type when i partition my drive with fdisk, cfdisk, etc. when what really matters is when i format my drive and the filesystem gets written? are there any programs out there that will partition and format? i usually partition and then end up having to format the drive during the OS installation.