Goodness, I'm going to try to make this as SHORT as possible. Insight into any of the following problems would be absolutely wonderful.

I have a Win98 machine that I'm trying to migrate to XP, but I want to be able to easily roll it back if I have to. I'd love to do a clean install, but I'm running into some troubles with that.

First, the drive I'm installing on doesn't have a separate partition ready for me to use. I was going to try booting from a boot disk, then using FDISK to create a partition that I can use for the clean install, but I'm being blocked there a bit. First, I'm THINKING that, by attempting to change the partitioning of the hard drive, it may blow away the installation I'm trying to protect with the clean install. Is that true, or can I use fdisk to create a seconary partition without destroying the disk's current data?

The second issue with the partitioning is that I've created a Win98 boot disk, but the machine is ignoring it when I reboot the machine with the boot disk in the drive. I don't know why, but the OS on the hard drive is loading despite the presence of the boot disk in the drive. Anyone know why that is HAPPENING?

Should I just go for the upgrade installation and hope for the best? Or am I just doing something wrong with the boot disk, and will the partitioning be possible without blowing away what's already on the hard drive?

Thanks for any help!
KathyYou can partition from the xp install disc and then you will have a dual boot system (98 and xp) which you will have to choose on boot up. As far as booting to the 98boot disc> did you set the bios to boot from a drive first? You can download a windows 98 boot disc here
www.bootdisk.com
Hope this helps.Have you done a compatibility test FIRST of all Kathy, because this is essential.

XP Compatability Test

How big is the drive is another very important issue and so is the rest of the hardware specification.

I would not advise you to pay any attention to the Microsoft minimum specification.

XP needs a reasonable processor and plenty of RAM.

Do you have XP Home or Pro? If it is an upgrade CD does it already have SP2.

You could repartition the drive using TeraByte Unlimited's BootIT NGs Partition Resizer. Just cancel the boot manager install screens and go straight to Partition Work.I would say that it is probably better to get hold of a new drive, btw. Bigger, faster and with a bigger drive cache.

I fitted a 7,200 rev/min 80 Gb drive with an 8 Mb cache before installing XP.Have you checked your CMOS settings to see if your floppy drive is detected?

When installing Win XP it's best to use a third-party application such as Partition Commander or Partition Magic rather than Fdisk.

Also if you can, do a clean install. An upgrade install can cause many more problems during the process.

[glb]Gizmo73[/glb]"The second issue with the partitioning is that I've created a Win98 boot disk, but the machine is ignoring it when I reboot the machine with the boot disk in the drive. I don't know why, but the OS on the hard drive is loading despite the presence of the boot disk in the drive. Anyone know why that is happening?"

When you start the computer you'll see on the boot screen which key, or keys, you have to press to enter the BIOS and then you can see if the boot sequence is...

Ist boot device = floppy drive
2nd boot device = IDE 0
3rd boot device = CD-ROM