create 2 primary partitions
how do you do this on a single hdd
You can partition a harddrive into 4 primary partitions max. Fdisk will do it and there are several programs such as Partition Magic that use a GUI.
Apologies, I was just wondering what the point of different primary partitions was.
Until you set logical drives within the partitions Windows is impotent.
Didn’t think about other OSes though. My bad.
If you google it, there are many good "howto"s on partitioning. I use a 60 gig partitioned into 3 primaries. One for XP,one for Slackware (Linux) and one for any new OS. My XP partition is split in a 4 gig C: and a 16 gig D: which cuts down on defragging time.
Regarding the OP. I have installed XP on a 300Mhz pentium II with 128 meg of RAM and it’s very stable and surprisingly fast when you turn off System Restore and all the unnecesary services. With a small C: drive and a D: for backing up your personal stuff,you put the install CD in,reboot and have a brand new clean install in 30-40 minutes.
" Install Windows XP to the second partition. The XP install will install the boot loader to enable you to choose between 98 and XP."
I assume XP asks if you want to do this when you install it?
Exactly,98 almost has to go on the first partition. Xp will give you an option of where to put it. 98 won’t.
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- Yep. If you choose to install XP on another partition from 98 or whatever, XP even puts its own OS selector in there if you have another selector installed already and don’t even want XP’s. The selection delay defaults to 25 seconds, but you can shorten it to as little as 5 seconds. -3 seconds, if you’re brave. The news from the trenches is that many computers can’t start XP at all with this setting put at less than 3 seconds.
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- Yep. If you choose to install XP on another partition from 98 or whatever, XP even puts its own OS selector in there if you have another selector installed already and don’t even want XP’s. The selection delay defaults to 25 seconds, but you can shorten it to as little as 5 seconds. -3 seconds, if you’re brave. The news from the trenches is that many computers can’t start XP at all with this setting put at less than 3 seconds.
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Just keep in mind: XP Professional, not XP Home Edition.
Home Edition, I’ve been made to understand by several friends more knowledgable than myself, is loaded with spyware and other evil, foul binary entities bent on no less than making you hate life.
I’m sticking with 98 SE until something forces me to update, and even then I won’t want to abandon it. That means that I won’t buy a name-brand pre-packaged system, since many (possibly all) not only come pre-installed with XP, but also set up some malevolent thing on the mboard which prohibits you from installing 98 SE no matter what you do. (Anyone know more about that dirty trick?)
I can’t tell you how profoundly, vitally important it’s been for repairing accidental file and partition corruption (and for other needs) to be able to run real DOS. Ain’t no such thing under XP.
You’re gonna have to back that kind of wild-ass claim up with a cite, because your friends don’t know what they’re talking about. XP Home is the “dumbed down” version of XP Pro, with some of the more advanced features disabled (and the price dropped) so it’s more palatable to the home user.
Oh yes, I remember this fundamental flaw.
Very amusing.
AFAIK, you can only have one primary partition.
Win 98 is a very unstable POS. Win 98 cannot address more than 512mb memory. Only MS OS worse than win 98 is win ME. XP is alot more stable and the latest servicepacks have improved it.
Win 2000 is the most stable MS OS there is. XP home is not full of Spyware. It does have some but they seem pretty innocent and easy to erase using Spybot. XP is very easy to set up and has the biggest driver collection.
Im a freelance technician working mostly for home users.
Nope. Four. But in fdisk terminology, you can only have one active partitition. That doesn’t mean the others are not active; it means they don’t boot.
"Home Edition, I’ve been made to understand by several friends more knowledgable than myself, is loaded with spyware "
Are you talking about online activation? The corp version doesn’t require that, I guess & if you get XP Home with a bios lock xp version, you don’t have to activate. My Dell is that way.
The answer, no matter what the question, is Mac OS X.
You’re welcome.
-nameless
Related question- out of the 512 megs of RAM, how much should be reserved for running video apps.?
(I’m not running any particularly high drain games.)
The corporate edition of XP pro doesn’t need activating. This is because the guy doing the installation on a 100+ workstation in an office, won’t have to activate every single one. This doen’t mean that XP pro is free of the activating thing “out of box experience” in MS-talk.
Back to the OP -
I think W2K is the best OS MS has made. However, I don’t regret upgrading to XP. There are some features that I wouldn’t want to be without, such as system restore. The disney-esque interface doesn’t bother me so much and after using it, since the release, I’m used to it. There are som features that need to be killed, though, since they suck up RAM and CPU at an alarming rate. Lotsa online guides for that. It was pure hell turning off MSN messenger, but I finally got rid of the stupid thing. Having worked with NT4.0, W2K and now XP since '99, I have to say I find NTFS vastly superior to FAT32. There is no way I would ever go back to W95, 98, Me, simply because I want controll over my computer. If this means a little more work when setting it up, downloading drivers ASF, then so be it. W98 and Me suck.
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That’s more a question about what videocard you have, dutchboy 208. The more memory it has, the better. And more expensive. 64 mb should do.
What exactly does system restore do?
The video card is an nvidia nforce 2. Wait… is that the 3d card? are they the same thing? I’m so confused…
System restore restores the system to a working version 
Some guy made a pretty interesting CD restore program & you all might want to look at it, you download it (about 3megs):
http://www.911cd.net/
“The 911 Rescue CD is an integrated CD-ROM that contains many diagnostics and repairing tools all easily accessed through the 911 Menu, it allows the access to the CDROM drives, the network shares, or both of them at the same time, it also includes the Microsoft Windows 2000/xp Professional Setup files, the Microsoft Windows 98/Me Setup files.”