Hi. First post and just need a little direction. I currently have a PIII 500 machine with win98se. My primary drive is 40 gb and I also have a second drive (60 gb).

I'm wanting to do a clean install of win2000 completely replacing win98. I've backed up everything to my second drive and am all ready to go. My bios is set to boot from CD.

When I start the install process I know that I'll have to deal with partitions and NTFS vs. FAT32.

My first question - how many partitions should I set up for win2000? I've heard 1, 2, even 3 from various sources.
Second - do I go with NTFS or FAT32? My second drive is of course FAT32. Will I have any problem accessing the files on this second drive (primarily video and audio files for video editing software and also mp3 collection)?

Any insight would be appreciated.

Thanks
Brad

Your new partitions should be NTFS. It's more reliable and can handle larger files (FAT32 has a 2 GB limit). I generally reserve about a 10 GB partition for Windows, the rest for data. The data partition should be NTFS, too - but be aware that on a slower machine it's more overhead. There are ways to speed it up, like Disable the NTFS Last Access Time Stamp.

There will be no problem accessing a FAT32 partition from Win2k. For example, I dual-boot into Linux and have FAT32 partitions specifically so that both OSes can access the data on that drive.

You should also use ERUNT -- The Emergency Recovery Utility NT to keep your Registry backed up -- it's cheap insurance.

Thanks...one more thing. Applications that I install (Office, Games, Video Editing software) - would you install these into the first partition, with windows, or in the data partition and just leave the first 10 gb for win alone?

Thanks again.

Brad