hello everybody! w98 was broken on a 20gb harddisk with only one partition. so i created an extended partition with new logical drive and copied the important data from c: to d:. as i had to format c: and reinstall the operating system anyway, i thought i'd try out how w2k would do on this machine. unfortunately it does not at all. gives a bluescreen during installation. my biggest mistake was i asked it to format c: in ntfs as i did not think there would be such a problem. now i have a c: partition which is ntfs and an extended/logical partition d: with fat32 on which my data resides (when booting c: it starts up what looks like w2k but goes right into installation mode and hangs always after time/date was set, so no way right now to get through this). i can't seem to just boot up to a dos-disk and format c: in fat32 mode so i could install win98 again. anyone know if i can format the c: partition somehow without loosing the extended partition with the d: drive and my data? thanks a lot

Partition Magic or Paragon Disk Manager do convert NTFS to FAT 32.Good luck.

If you have a boot disk with the "fdisk" command on it, you can delete the primary partition, (In "fdisk" choose "delete partition" and "non-dos" partition), then create a new one after rebooting and going into "fdisk" again. Then you can "format" c: and re-install. I've done this several times and kept the extended data. Another easy way, since you have access to the net, is download the 1st installation disk of Mandrake Linux (iso to burn)and go as far as formatting the primary partition, then exit out of install immediately. You can boot up with that install disk.

Ranish Partition manager is another useful nifty tool to get rid of unwanted difficult to remove partitions. Go to http://homepage.ntlworld.com/mosaddique/ and check out the link titled "partition and format using Ranish Partition Manager". Also deleting just the primary partition will not disturb or harm the contents of your extended partition and logical drives.

thanks for your replies! i will try this tonight. i just wasn't sure and could not find any info on what will happen to the extended partitions if i delete/format the primary partition. if the extended partitions are kept when deleting them, then everything should be fine. i'll post how it went. thanks again

worked as advertised. boot from w98 bootdisk. start fdisk. delete primary partition, create primary partition. format primary partition and reinstall w98. extended partition with its logical drive was not touched during this procedure. data saved thanks for the help