HDD Setting

Hi, In my process of getting things right before a upgrade I have this question in regards to the hard drive partitions. This machine has 3 drives at present one of witch has the old Windows 98 SE on it as I used to dual boot this PC but not any more for some time now and not going to anymore.
This drive has 3 Partitions : H: Win 98SE Fat 32 (Active) I: and J: NTFS
My C: drive is as Windows calls it (System) should this old Windows 98 Partition still be Active or what should I do with it delete and hope for the best.
regards
hawk22

 

You'll probably get a few different answers but personally, I'd use a 98se boot disk, FDISK the MBR, use FDISK to delete all partitions and then build just one partition and make it active. Exit and shutdown. Boot with your XP CD and format the drive NTFS and then do your installation. I usually use multiple drives so I don't play around too much with partitioning my system drive (or any other for that matter).

 

Hi, sorry Rockster, maybe I didn't explain myself properly here.
I do have 3 seperate hard drives here C: is on a 80 Gig drive and has XP Pro as OS and the other two are slaves the one that I am refering to is a 40 gig and back some time ago was the C: drive under 98SE that 40 gig drive has 3 partitions on it and one of them has Windows 98SE on it and is labeled Active. I had always thought only the partition with the current OS on it was Active.
My concern is should this be active and how to format this partition to get rid of 98SE.
hope I explained myself better this time.
thank you
hawk22

 

Hello Hawk,

Any primary partition is "active" and doesn't mean all that much as far formating goes unless its the boot partition.

Format it using XP - Right click on My Computer > Manage > Disk management > right click on the 98 partition > format.

If the partition is less than 32 GB, you can format it as FAT32 if you want to. Otherwise as NTFS.

Regards - Charles

 

Thanks for that Charles
hawk22