OT: Ready to reinstall.

[Don Henthorn Smithville, TX]

I have all my data transferred to the secondary smaller hard drive. Now, the question is, what is the procedure for wiping the primary drive clean and installing Win98SE and then Xp. I know I will need to partition the drive after it is clean, but do I make all the partitions first? Right now I am booting from a CD, since that is the only way to get anything going. As you can tell I know just enough to be dangerous.

[Matt Meiser]

I don't remember exactly how the Win98 install goes, but what I would do is delete all the partitions from the disk, then create one partition large enough for your Win98 install. Then when you install XP, create your XP partition using NTFS. Your 98 install won't be able to access the XP partition, but you XP install will be able to access the 98 partition, but you'll get the advantages of using NTFS for your XP drive instead of FAT32.

[Michael Perata]

Don

You shouldn't need to reinstall 98 if you are upgrading. The XP install will ask you for the 98 disk to prove you are upgrading.

If I recall, XP does not give you much control over an install unless you choose a couple of program switches. You should pay attention during the early stages of the install to see if it lets you choose the partition. If it does, then follow Matt's advice. If it doesn't give you a choice, you'll need to do some reading on how to perform a "FDISK" to get back to a single partition.

[John Miliunas]

Don, man, you're really stretching this old boy's memory to the max! Win 98 is a bootable CD but, I believe it also came with a boot floppy with utilities for deleting and creating partitions. I think if you just boot with the CD to install, you may not have the opportunity to scrub and repartition the drive. If you don't have the floppy, you can find one of many here: http://freepctech.com/pc/002/files010.shtml Good luck!:) :cool: