W98se and Wxp dual boot or?

I am getting my new hard drive (in sig) in place of my 80gig maxtor that doesnt work anymore. Since it is 160 gig, and I have a lot of old software and games that wont run on my XP pro (as well as my scanner), I was wondering if I could do a dual boot without compromising my performance in xp or the ntfs file system that is better, or am I better off just installing w98se on an old hd on fat32 and booting onto that if I want to do old stuff? Or is there a better way for me to do this cheaply?

You can only dual boot Win98 and XP if you install Win98 first in fat16. There's shouldn't be any performance decrease.

well, w98se uses fat 32, but I really am not sure I want to make a fat 32 partition for the first few gigs of fast seek time section of my hard drive to run w98se on fat 32 once in a while. I really wish microsoft would have realized this and put a provision in winxp to format a section in end of drive for win98 or 95 or dos for people that wanted to run old programs or hardware once in a while. Might be better off to use a second drive, not sure, wish there was a way to put w98se on the end of the drive where it belongs, anyone?

DMac said:

You can only dual boot Win98 and XP if you install Win98 first in fat16. There's shouldn't be any performance decrease.

Click to expand...

Win98 runs on either FAT16 or FAT32 filesystems.

XP will also run quite happily of a FAT32 partition. The beauty of keeping both your partitions FAT32 is that both OSes can access all the data on the drive.

As to your old software and games, WinXP's compatibility mode is excellent at playing old games/running old software, from Win95, 98, NT, and 2000.....

Ok, what is windows xp compatibility mode? Does Xp Pro have it? I can get a new scanner if my software will run and that would make things simple

Yes, both XP Home and XP Pro have compatability mode. Most software (even old stuff) I've come across dosen't require it, but should a program be picky, there's a chance that running it under compatability mode will make it happier. Definatly try some of the software on your XP box to see if it works!

JigPu