I want to dual boot my 98 with xp on a new 40 GB hard drive? how do I use fdisk to set it up? do I set up an active primary partition for w98, then set up the rest of the space on the drive as an extended partition, split it into 2 drives, one for xp and the other for data/backup files? does the partition being used for xp need to be an active primary partition? Al

Try this site. Either that or go to www.microsoft.com and search on dual boot in XP. I just followed those instructions without any problems. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q217210

or stay right here on Computing.net and get your how to here! This has 4 OS on one system but you can stop with just two. http://www.computing.net/howto/advanced/4os/

No the partition for XP doesn't have to be active or primary or even NTFS. Windows 98 can't read an NTFS drive so be careful. I have dual boot 98 and XP and now i want to go back to just 98, if i just delete boot.ini from windows 98 will my computer automatcally boot windows 98? I think the file was created when I installed XP

When you install Win98, create a 2gig primary partition and format it (FAT), then when you do the windows 98 setup select that partition for setup. Then when installing Win XP create a new partition (in the xp setup utility) and setup XP on the new partition. So at this point you'll have 2 partitions. Boot into windows XP and using the Admin tools, disk manager create 2 more partitions, one primary partition formatted to FAT (no higher than FAT16) for data for windows 98, and then an extended partition for your XP files. As for the question about the "boot.ini" remove the line of code reffering to XP and change the "timeout=30" line to "timeout=5". To truly get rid of XP thought you'll want to format the NTFS partition to FAT or you'll be wasting HDD space.