Many thanks to David Gillett, John Sproule, ang Hugh Vandervoort for their input. I took the advice and partitioned my 120 gig hdd to 80/20/approx 14 gig.using the win xp pro disk.

I then formatted only the 80 gig partition in NTFS and installed win xp pro with SP2. all went well and i am posting this from this system.

I have left the 20/14 gig unformatted to get some further advice and decide.

(1) I need to transfer some data from my 6 year old quantum fireball with win 98 se. will it be possible to do this (because this obviously is in fat32) to NTFS if i format the other two partitions in NTFS?

(2)I am also thinking of having either "linspire" or "knoppix" just to learn and will this be possible with NTFS?

(3) The url given by Hugh Vandervoort was very helpfull but i need to go through it 2/3 times to understand the technicalities and will do so in leisure.

TIA for any further input and regards---Venkat

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