I have a 160 gig HD. I need a little space on it for some FAT & FAT32 stuff. My XP is on C: which is Partition2 and my Recovery Console is on D: Partition1 of the drive.

I tried to partition a piece of C: for the space but XP won't let me. It appears I have to dump "all" in order to do a partition. Has anyone some expertise on how I can get about 4 Mbytes of space without cleaning off my HD? I don't mind cleaning XP off C: because I can just dump from D: to C:. If I have to clean the entire HD, I will be forced to rebuild my D: too. Rather than do that, I would probably just format the D: drive and use all of it for the lower FATs. The problem with that is my recovery console is on D: and I think I need that to pick which boot I will do each start up. I will be putting 98 on the lower FAT area and XP back on C: with NTFS.

A program like Partition Magic will do this for you...the XP setup, as you said, only blows away/creates partitions...it will not resize an existing partition.

If you're going to be reinstalling Windows on any of the drives, I'd go ahead and use XP's tools and blow the setup away. The reason I say this is because you'll want to install Windows 98 first, and then XP, as the XP bootloader can then automatically detect the 98 installation and account for it. If you install Windows 98 on the system using the method you described, it will kind of "throw a wrench in the works", as it might overwrite XP's bootloader and render XP unbootable.

What type of system do you have, anyways? You might be able to do without that "recovery" partition, as it might just contain diagnostics on certain machines.

My drive D: on the HD which is Partition1, contains a complete factory back up of what is installed on drive C: which is Partition2.

D: also contains the "Recovery Console" which on normal use will have items to help on boot to ask "which drive do you want to use?". I probably can put that back on by itself but it may not work or work well without the rest of the stuff normally stored on D:

A program like Partition Magic sounds like what you need, but if you decide to format everything and start over, this link has instructions for dual-booting:
http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread11350.html

Sorry about your difficullties w/the partitioning. I don't yet have any personal
exp. setting up a hard drive but I found some excellent help at " the old geek
on XP.com that raised some real good Questions and made me take some other items into consideration befoe jumping into it best of luck.

Hello,

I would rebuild it from scratch too. Do the partition management by hand, and then install 98, and then XP.

If you plan to ever dabble with Linux, keep a 10 - 15 GB space available for it. You can install Linux at a later date, and it will want to be "last" too.

Partition Magic may do what you want, but I am a firm believer that doing it by hand, without the "magic" is the best solution. Besides, if something goes wrong with the magic, you will end up doing it by hand anyways.

Remember that 98 will not be able to deal with NTFS.

Christian