Venkat Viswanathan wrote:
> 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


Venkat:
Since you're thinking about Linux, then I'd suggest that one of the 
unused partitions be formatted as fat32. You can this use this to store 
data that you can access from both linux and xp. While linux can read 
ntfs filesystems with no problems, attempting to write from linux to 
ntfs is a Very Bad Idea.

Formatting the third partition for linux should be left to the linux
installer. It will also handle the messy details of enabling you to dual
boot between XP and linux. (BTW -- be sure to consider Ubuntu; I've been
using it for the past six months and am very pleased with it.)

As for your old drive, just change it from master to slave; XP will have
no problems accessing the data on it.

Regards,
Carroll Grigsby

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