I am thinking of adding a second hard drive (secondary or slave) and install Win XP in it. I would appreciate any advice on the procedure. My question is: when turning the pc on, how I will be able to choose which drive/OS I am working with? Thanks for any reply.

Windows XP will add a boot menu if it finds another operating system like Win98. This will let you choose which OS to load when you turn on the PC. Boot up with your XP CD, and during setup it will ask you where to install it. Choose your new hard drive and partition/format it if necessary. After that it will walk you through everything.

Thanks for answering. It seems simpler than I thought.

I just want to second John's advice. Plug in the hard drive making sure the jumpers are set correctly. Boot to the XP cd. Follow the onscreen instructions and choose to install to the "unpartitioned space". You can then format it during setup. XP will install a boot loader and let you choose which OS you want to boot into on every boot up. Easy!:)

Some additional thoughts: Is it better to add it as Secondary IDE Master. My configuration is: Primary IDE Master - Currient Maxtor HD (c:) Primary IDE Slave - Not Installed Secondary IDE Master - DVD drive Secondary IDE Slave - CDRW drive I'm thinking of putting the DVD to primary slave and the new HD with xp to primary master. Also, if the new HD will be NTSF will I have the option of dual boot menu (boot loader)? Thanks again.

There are many schools of thought on the IDE setup, but if it were me I would set the DVD as primary slave and the new hard drive as Secondary master. This ensures that the fastest devices are primary, and I believe this setup can help with "on-the-fly" burning for your cd-rw. If you set the new hard drive up as NTFS (New Technology File System), You will still get the boot loader. The boot files actually reside on the C:\ drive (ntldr, boot.ini, etc...). Remember that(just stick it in the back of your mind somewhere) if you ever have to format c: for any reason. You'll have to do a repair install of XP(a choice you get by booting to the XP cd) to get your boot loader files back. The only difference you will see if you use NTFS for your secondary drive is Windows ME (or 98 or 95 or DOS or 3.1) will not see this hard drive. It cannot read NTFS, so it will pretend it is not even there. So in ME you will have the c:, d:, and e: drives... and in XP you will have the c:, d:, e:, and f: drives. If you have lots of partitions on each drive, this can get kind of confusing because of the lettering scheme of Windows. And if you plan on sharing files between XP and ME, you will have to remember that to share, you will have to be in XP. Other than that, no problems at all. I have three hard drives... many partitions... several of those are formatted NTFS. The only real problem I have is being somewhat disorganized when I'm trying to find a download... depending upon which OS I'm sitting in.:p