Installing XP on 98se drive

I'm interested in installing XP on my existing Win98SE drive, and I think doing a clean install makes the most sense. Unfortunately my 100GB drive only has about 10GB free due to all of the movies & music I've collected. I know storage is cheap, but I need to install XP today and I don't have any place to back all of this stuff up.

Now I know I've re-installed Win98SE multiple times this way, but want to make sure it will work with XP. I usually boot to my 2nd drive that has 98SE installed as well, then in Explorer delete the Windows & Program Files directories on the 1st drive. I also delete any system files like autoexec.bat on the 1st drive. Then I reboot to the 1st drive using the 98SE CD to do a fresh install. It creates a clean installation but leaves the rest of the drive's contents alone. Yes, I still have to reinstall all of my programs from scratch, but at least my movie & music files remain.

Will the same procedure work for XP as long as I choose to keep the filesystem FAT32 and select not to format the drive?

Thanks for any info.

 

Okay, let me explain this better so as to not offend your sensibilities...

I have some space on the 2nd hard drive to backup the essentials, but I don't have time to burn 130 CDs and backup everything. It wouldn't kill me if I lost the non-essential stuff, but it would be nice if it didn't get deleted.

In theory, XP shouldn't overwrite the drive's contents as long in the install screens I don't let it create a new partition nor reformat the drive, correct? Has anybody else done this?

 

No reason the technique you mention shouldn't work fine with XP.

But you will run into a problem with a drive that will have so little free space left. XP is quite a bit larger than 98 so my guess is you'll have only about 5% or less of your drive as free space and anything below 10% is very likely to cause problems. Worse with FAT32 since it doesn't deal with fragmentation as well as NTFS does and that drive is gonna frag big time and quickly.

If you can move enough stuff to the 2nd drive to free up some room, what you propose should work. You won't have a dual-boot system but you should have a working XP system with 98 still available as long as you start from a floppy and path over to the 2nd drive.

As to "offend your sensibilities ", I doubt that you would. Lots of the qualifying comments we put on here are not aimed specifically at the original poster but at others who may read the thread later and may not have as much experience. Better to warn about too many things than not to warn enough and have someone trash a system.

 

Thanks alot Newt. That's what I wanted to know!

Rather than booting from floppy, I should still be able to boot to the 2nd (Win98SE) drive if I disable the XP drive in my BIOS setup, shouldn't I? That's what I do now to boot to my 2nd drive -- I don't have a true dual-boot Win98/Win98 system.

And I'm definitely inclined to disable that 2nd drive in the BIOS (or physically disconnect it) when I install XP on the 1st. I'd rather just ***** up one drive than both!

Thanks again.