I used xp with 2 fat32 partitions on my 40G hd. I wanted to fomat one of them with the win95 bootdisk because format didn`t work in xp. The boot disk sent me to FDISK where I made no changes, I just turned off my pc. When I restarted xp wouldn`t load. I formated the drive to ntfs with the xp disc(because it didn`t give me any other option), when the xp setup restarted my pc after copying all the files, it started at the beginning of setup & just went in a loop, isntalling files, restart and staring setup all over. I finally got 98se to format the hd and installed ME but now the partition my old xp was on is gone, and if I try to upgrade to xp, I just get an error screen after the first setup restart.

whoa....that is a mouth full! Does your pc boot with the win xp disk? If not, here's what I did,.....put in the win98 bootdisk, fdisked all partitions, reformat all partitions (fat32), if you want to dual boot WIN ME, load that up first and XP second. If you just want to run xp....pop in the six xp boot disks, follow the instructions till it asks for the xp cd..........off ya go.

I don't know if this will help, but i did have a rather nasty experience once with a win 98 boot disk. There were three partitions, a primary with Fat16 (it was but 500mb and had dos 6.2 on it, so who needs more?) and than an extended partition wich was divided in two partitions, the first being NTFS (under windows 2000) and the second Fat32 (just for data). I booted with a win 98 bootdisk and used fdisk to remove the third partition (the Fat32) and Fdisk only saw that one (and the Fat16, of course), but not the NTFS, so i just removed the first one. When i rebooted, the NTFS partition was gone, but the fat32 was still there. My humble thought on this is tha Fdisk cannot read NTFS, and wil therefore not show them in the list. When you than delete a partition, it deletes the first (or second, or whatever you have chosen) partition, wch is not neccesarily the first (or second or...) in the list since the NTFS'ses are still in between that list. It's just a thougth, of course...

NTFS partitions should show up in fdisk by selecting the non-dos partition item