Susan:

[My questions are mostly rhetorical, requiring no email answer.]

It seems you want to make things more complicated than they are. You have
a 30G plus a 40G HDD? Unless you have a tremendous, professional need for
HDD space, you seem to have a huge overkill. As I understand it, only
extensive 3D graphics, music CD creation, and/or film/video editing would
require 70G of HDD. (I expect to do much of the same on one 17G HDD.)

Why do you want to run WinME and/or Win98SE along with the forthcoming
WinXP? WinXP should replace both WinME and Win NTx, combining the best of
both plus upgrades. Most reviewers of the WinXP Beta seem to agree that
WinXP will be more stable than WinME and add features not available in
WinNT.

So, why worry about a multible boot? You may have a reason to dual boot
between WinXP and Linux, but what else?

I don't use either Linux OS or Partition Magic (any version), but if you
want to use Linux simultaneously with any version of Windows, why not use
one HDD (minimum 30G) for each?

We dumped Win98SE (as we did all of its predecessors back to Win3.0) for
WinME. ME has proven more stable and has some added features. We miss
some of SE's intrinsic help & troubleshooting programs/features - most of
which are now available online - but on balance, we prefer WinME, and are
looking forward to XP.

I can't advise on boot partitions for multiple OS, but for a single Winxx
OS, I'd recommend 2.0-2.5G as a basic logical HDD partition for
Windows-xx (larger, if you keep your Win Swapfile on the boot drive), and
the rest to suit your needs. If you really need to install both Linux AND
Windows, why not install one on your 30G and one on your 40G?

You said that "250mb was not enough for an OS." No doubt. WinME typically
requires 1.5G minimum for OS and a swap file.

Jack

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