I am trying to help a friend build his pc and in particular but have some questions about partitioning and dual booting different windows platforms. He currently has one 8gb HD but has now got a 120gb HD as well. He wants to wipe his 8gb hd and partition it for use with Win98se and add the 120gb hd and partition this to use Win2k pro. The 8gb drive would be fat32 and Win2k would preferably be NTFS. What we are confused about is - does he need to have a primary partition on both drives or can the primary (active) just sit on the 8gb drive and the 120gb drive be all logical partitions??. Whats the best approach for a dual boot configuration in this case??

You would need a primary partition on both drives. An extended partition with logical drives cannot exist until there is a primary.

You can have a drive with an Extended partition only. This is then formatted as single logical-drive, or can be further subdivided into two or more logical-drives... This drive cannot be made bootable. Only a Primary partition can be made bootable. Typically you create the Extended only drive via the Fdisk util... If you have Primary and Extended on the Master drive, and Extended only on Slave, then drive letter assignments (via dos/'9x) on second drive follow logically on from the Master. But if there is a Primary on both drives, then the Primary partitions become c: and d: respectively, then logical-drives on Master are assigned, then those on the Slave; the drive letter assignment 'breaks the logical-seqence' across the drives in effect... More on this whole drive letter assignment at: http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q51/9/78.ASP If intending both Primary and Extended partitions, the Primary is created first. However via PM/SC and similar utils one can add in a Primary on an Extended only drive...

You only need primary partitions of which you can have 4 per disk. I highly advise that you create a 50meg primary on the 8gig then your primary partition for 98 and W2K. This way if one OS gets corrupt, like 98, and you want to reformate, you don't have to go thru hoops to get W2K working again since you just erased its boot loader when you formatted c: