My weekly computer question - dual boot 98/XP

[World Eater]

For those of you who have kept up, getting all this equipment in my studio to harmoniously coexist has been a total pain in the butt.

First it was dual booting linux and XP. Next, my old computer dies, and the fancy soundcard in it wouldn't work in XP. Well, I'm happy to say this may be the final sordid chapter of my computer problems.

I'll spare you all the interesting details of how I came to where I'm at, but instead will ask for your wealth of knowledge once more.

The situation - I have a Win98 drive from an old comp that I threw into my new comp, recognized the new hardware around it, and updated perfectly. While it was doing this, my XP drive was sitting on my counter.

I was going to reformat my XP drive, then add it as a second drive and reinstall XP on it, but I was wondering if I could do that without killing it. At the moment I have to backup everything, and then reinstall everything, which needless to say, is a big pain in the ass.

I have an old 12 gig drive sitting around, and was wondering if I could install XP on it, then swap my other XP drive on it?

Any ideas?

Also should I do XP as NTFS or Fat32? I would prefer NTFS, and I have no need to share files between them, so I don't think it would be a problem.

Al always, thanks in advance.