Iam going to do my own build soon and I was wondering ,since I want to keep Windows Me and also have XP .Is it better to have one H.D, and partition it ,or 2 H.D. one for each O/S ? I can either go with one 120Gig H.D. or 2 60 Gig ! Input please. I want to keep WinMe because, I know this O/S well and I have some applications that wont work under XP ! Thanks to All,Nick

Hi read this info at http://partition.radified.com/

There really is no "better" if doing multiboot with one drive or two. I do recommend a small primary active partition then the ME and XP partitions. You would do this if on one drive or two. It allows you to toast one OS without toasting the other. For example if you toasted ME you would not be able to boot XP since XP boot files reside at the root of c: [Me]. The only advantage two drives have over one is drive failure. With two drives you can get half your data back. [assuming this drive has the half you want] But you should be backing up everything so you don't have this worry.

Two drives are nice for backups. You can backup your important data from each system to the other drive.

I work with ME and XP on the same drive while using Partiton Magic from PowerQuest. It allows you to make two primary partitions and hide the one you're not using. With the bootmanager that came with it you can hide the primary partition not needed and as many other partitions as you like. I still work with fat32 in both partitions which allows me access to all other partitions from both OS's. I have two small partitions for ME (5GB) and XP (6GB) that have only the OS and the hardware drivers on them. The active is C: and the other is hidden. D: is my second drive and it's also quite small (around 8GB) and has all important programs (no games) installed to it. On a third old drive (8,4GB - drive letter E: - you can also use another partition on drive1) I have all my personal data and downloaded files. The rest is partitioned to maximal 16GB (to keep the clusters from getting too big) and one big partition for mp3, backup and other big files. That way I can make relative small backups of both OS's, the programs and my data! Using DriveImage (also PowerQuest) that work well for years and also packs the backup to 50% of the original size. If you do it that way I would still suggest two drives so you can store the backups on both drives. That way your system survives even a harddrive crash. You can also store on CD/DVD-RW but that's slow so you should do it only from time to time. BTW: There are also other (free) bootmanagers and backup programs out there but I don't know if they also work that good! Oh, and only to mention it, I also have Linux on the second harddrive and I use 5 drives on that system (three of them from 1 to 8,4 GB - leftovers from older computers!)!

Thank you,to all that replied ,you have given me some very good food for thought ! Sincerely Nick