Bob wrote:

> My set-up at present is a dual boot system with win 98 on one
> partition
> and win xp on another. On boot up I am offered the choice by winxp
> boot manager to start either system.
> This has been working fine until recently. It appears that something
> in
> win98 system has become corrupted and it does not work very well. My
> idea would be to delete win98 altogether and just add the space to the
> partition that contains winxp or get rid of the second partition. I
> don't really need win98 any more, I would be quite satisfied with just
> winxp.
> I should add that I have Acronis Partition Expert installed in win98.
> I have been uninstalling programs from win98 as I get them up and
> running on winxp and transferring the space to the winxp partition
> Is what I am thinking feasible or am I likely to muck up my winxp
> installation. And what will happen to the winxp boot manager?

You can't really just add the space to the XP partition without then
needing to redo XP. But there really isn't any need to - the Win98
partition will be available to you to save things on.

From XP, make sure you can see all hidden files (Folder Options>View).
Then - still in XP - go to the Win98 partition and delete everything
except the XP boot files (boot.ini, ntldr, Ntdetect.com). Don't try to
delete everything in one go because Windows doesn't do well with huge
deletions like that. Of course, you will back up any data you need from
Win98 first.

So now you've got nothing on the formerly-Win98 partition except XP's
boot files. Do Start>Run>msconfig [enter]. Now you'll have the System
Configuration Utility. On the BOOT.INI tab, you'll see a button to
click that says "check all boot paths). It will find that there are no
longer Win98 boot files and fix your boot.ini. Or you can hand-edit
your boot.ini file in Notepad to remove the reference to Win98. Now
your XP installation will have two partitions - the C: which you can
use to store data or install programs on if you need more space and
whatever drive letter your XP install is on.

Malke
--
Elephant Boy Computers
www.elephantboycomputers.com
"Don't Panic!"
MS-MVP Windows - Shell/User