At 11:06 AM 2/27/2003 -0600, you wrote: >If the partition is formatted with NTFS, that method will not work >Larry A. Kaduce You only need one of the partitions to be FAT or FAT32 in order for this to work. DOS will need to see a partition that it can copy the I386 directory from, and a active primary C drive it can copy them to. Personally I always make the <C> Primary active boot partition, either FAT or FAT32, because it is the fastest file system, on the fastest part of the hard drive. I typically make it 500 to a 1000 megs, and put my 350 meg swap file on it, as well as any boot manager, and maybe a folder with dos utilities. If I dual boot Win98 I will make it FAT32 and install 98 here first. But even if I just install NT, 2000 or XP on a NTFS partition I will put the boot partition as a separate FAT partition that can boot to DOS. This makes troubleshooting a lot easier when things go wrong. It also makes it easy to back up and restore the MBR. Rode The NOSPIN Group http://freepctech.com > > >You cannot run XP setup from a DOS boot floppy. > > >Yes you can. Boot off a floppy that is setup to load smartdrive.exe, and, if >necessary, your CDROM DOS drivers. I recommend configuring smartdrive with a >huge cache, one quarter of your RAM, up to 36 megs. If you do not do this, >and use the smartdrive default size, then it can take a very long time, >hours, to transfer the startup files, from your i386 directory to your C >drive. Nobody, including Microsoft, understands why this occurs on some PCs. >Make sure you have at least 216 megabyets of hard drive space available on >your CD drive. Do you want to signoff PCBUILD or just change to Digest mode - visit our web site: http://freepctech.com/pcbuild.shtml