I am trying to create a primary partition on my 16 gig hdd. I used the help tutorial on this subject but when i try to right click on free space all i get is "what's this". I want to make a partition so i can dual boot using win98se cause my hunting programs run very poorly with xp. I dont want to reformat and use fdisk. Any way to do this without having to reformat and re-install EVERYTHING all over? I have 12 gig free, but still no use. Thanks in advance - pulling out hair

Yan do this in disk management, which is found in My Computer (right click) and manage. BUT FIRST, you will have to go to the command line and create an extended or logical partition. OR my suggestion, buy yourself a copy of partition magic, it's easy, cheap, and it does it all. As far as not using FDISK, it can't be done, but you can use diskpart. That should do the trick. Check XP help for how to use the switches.

people never lern how useful windows help is.. go to help and so a search for "unallocated space" .. your answer is there. Hope this helps. Or check the microsoft knowledge database.

I did go to computer managment, and it says that i have 0mb of unallocated space and 0mb of reserved space. Don't see how this is possible when i have 12 gigs free space.

Get Partition Magic. It allows you to alter the size etc. and create new partitions without having any effect on your existing data and programs. Much faster and more flexible than fdisk. It also comes with Boot Magic which is a program to run dual boot setups.

Lou, you can't use any of the 12gig as 'unallocated' space because it has already been 'allocated' to your hard drive although it is empty. The only 2 options you have is to format your hard drive, partition it into at least two partitions then reinstall 98 on "C" and XP on "D". XP will create a boot.ini and offer you the dual boot screen at startup. The other option is to use a third party partitiong software such as Partition Magic 7.0 which will allow you to create partition/s from within windows without losing data. You can then install Win98 to another partition. PM7 also comes with Boot Magic which will again allow you to choose which OS to boot into at startup.

Ja, I got Partition Magic 7.02, now the prog says since I will be installing win98 on new partition it has to be on first disk only because it has to be before cyliner 1024 to be bootable. It then says to put new partition before C:HP_Pavilion. If I put new part here, am I going to lose all my data that is installed on C: now and have to go thru the task of re-installing everything (want to avoid this at all costs).?