i have a dual boot (c:win98/d:winxp pro) my boot ini is on the c:partition. i want to do away with that partition without messing anything up....how do i go about this....can i use partiton magic and merge them and that work or can those boot files be moved to d: and if so do they need to be edited to work?

also i have 3 gmail invites to give away? anyone want one?

C: is your boot drive. Deleting it will cause you a whole lot of problems. You could copy the boot files to another drive and make that the boot drive, but it will almost certainly mean modifying boot.IN and going into the recovery console to make the new drive bootable. Boot.IN works on partitions which are not the same of drives. It all depends on what you intend doing with the C: drive and where the system drives are located. Without knowing how the rest of your system is set up there is no way of knowing how to modify boot.ini correctly. I'll pass on the gmail invites thank you very much. Stuart

Stuart's advice is good. I'd love one of the gmail invites please

My Email address in case Cheers Email - kinel @ www.com - remove spaces

The big danger in messing about with your partitions is that XP is installed in "D" so all it's registry settings are set that way. You cannot merge C & D. If you no longer want 98 as an operating system there are a couple of ways around this. Is XP your default boot option? In other words if you do not choose during the boot process which operating system boots after the timeout runs down? If it's xp then my recommendation would be to edit the timeout value to zero, delete the C/Windows folderbut make sure you leave the bootfiles in the root of C drive intact. then use your C drive for storage or whatever. Another option would be after removing all the contents of the C partition except the bootfiles, use something like Partition Magic8 to re-size the C drive to free up space to expand D. I personally do not recommend this as I've read too many posts from people who have trashed their systems with PM, but it is an option and some people swear by it. The final option would be to format the drive completely and reinstal XP. Whatever you decide to do there are three things I would advise you do first. BACK-UP, BACK-UP AND BACK-UP Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you feed him for life.

<<BACK-UP, BACK-UP AND BACK-UP>> I couldn't agree more. My computer was running perfectly then 2 days later it was properly broken, but i luckily chose to back up when it started to get a bit sluggish/tired. So before you do ANYTHING back up all the stuff you don't want to lose! also do you want to get rid of the dual boot (as you didn't say that): if so you can't get rid of the partion and put both OS's on the same partition. If you want to get rid of the dual boot the easiest way would be to hardly change anything (if it aint broke don't fix it) just make XP default and set the timer to 0, then as Richard says you can just delete the C:windows folder and use C for storage (Leaving the boot stuff as it is) I haven't used partition magic so can't really advise about that, but surely would be loads easier to just leave C as it is and use for storage. it's up to you but then you can just reformat and reparition next time XP goes very wrong! Hope that helps EJ p.s. if you've still got a gmail invite i'd like one please. [a939kicks@yahoo.co.uk]