A question for the XPerts..ahah...hah...umm

Hi All,

Have recently upgraded my home system and decided to give WinXP a try, dual booting with my original installation of W98se. To cut a long story short, i'm more than happy with XP, haven't even looked at 98 for the past two weeks and i now want to reclaim the wasted space that is my Win98 C: partition. Can i transfer XP onto my C: partition (its currently on D:), preferably using something like Partition Magic v7 to merge the C: and D: paritions into a single NTFS C: partition? (D: is currently NTFS, C: is FAT32). Is this going to be a doddle or a whole world of heartache, followed by the advice to "just reinstall...its easier"??

As i mentioned, i'm new to XP, so be kind to me :D

Whilst I`m no XPert my opinion is that you would be better off starting from scratch by backing up all you data,passwords etc and using the XP CDs install routine to remove all partitions and remake anew as FAT32,your only giving yourself a lot of work to do it any other way.

I'd copy any data you want to save from the FAT32 partition over to your NTFS partition. After you do that, boot to a Win98 boot disk and run FDISK. Delete the FAT32 partition, leaving it undefined. (I think before you do that you might want to make sure that D is set as the active partition).

Once that's done you should be able to run Partition Magic, or whatever utility you happen to have, and stretch/resize your existing NTFS partition to the maximum size of the drive.

*disclaimer*
I'd highly advise backing up any pertinent info to another hard drive or to a CD-R before messing with the partitions.

Yep, thats pretty much what i was thinking. Will the Bootmanager still come up or is it sensible enough to realise that the Win98 partition is no longer there? If not, how do i tell it?

Thanks,