G'day guys Here's my problem, I've got a pentium 4 1.7 Ghz which has windows XP on a single partition. What I want to know is how do I reformat my 40 gig hard drive into 2 partitions, one that boots up on 98 and the other on XP. Do I go to My Computer in XP, select C drive, file, format and go for "quick format"? If this is correct do I then use a 98 startup disk use FDISK to partition, format and then install 98 and XP on these partitions. If I'm still going down the right track (corrections appreciated) how do I start up or swap between the two OS. Do I use my Hard Drive to boot up in 98 and my CDROM for XP and do I set this up via CMOS BIOS Facility. Appreciate any help. Darren

The simple way to dual boot between Win9x and Win XP would be to partition your hard drive roughly as follows: C: FAT32, win9x D: FAT32 or NTFS, winxp Adjust the partition sizes according to your hd size and the amount of space that you want to allocate for each OS. Create the partition using win 9x or win me startup disk. Then you need only to format the win9x partition at this time, the winxp installation routine can format its partition as part of the setup routine Install win9x first in c:\windows when asked for the default windows directory. Install winxp in d:\windows. The winxp installation routine will automatically set up the multi-boot menu for you. You don't need any third-party programs like boot magic. Hope this answers your questions. Bye

If you install the OSs correctly, when you start your pc, you will see a menu that allows you to choose which OS you want to use. The default settings for this menu can be readily edited from within winxp. Also, you should not use the quick format. Bye

Yes, you do use FDISK to partition and FORMAT to format the win9x partition. Bye

I used Partition Magic 7.0 to repartition my hard drive when I wanted to do the same thing. I created three drives. A c: drive for XP, another partition for Win98 (c: drive when active), and one last drive (drive d:) to hold data. I use Boot Magic as a boot manager. It comes free with Partition Magic. When set up this way, one of the operating systems is always on a hidden partition and all programs are installed on each partition. They share data on drive d: This has worked flawlessly for six months or so. While doing this setup, I lost no data and since your hard drive is already formatted, you will not need to do that either although Partition Magic will allow you to format without the usual data loss.