Ok, I'm tired of my daily calls from my wife, telling me that either my daughters games or the kids she babysits games won't run on XP (ntfs). (compatibility mode? yeah that works lol)So I'm ready to wipe XP out however, I will have to replace it with another Ms product until I can get them to see the light or get wine to work (which I haven't really tried).

So can I wipe Xp and install 98se, while not losing my mandrake 10 install? The way I see it is, install 98se, then boot with mandy 10 cd1 in, then "upgrade" this install, which would restore lilo. At least thats my plan until you guys tell me I'm and give other instructions

Well Win98 shouldnt see anything but the FAT partitions
If you create the partition the safest way is create the filesystem as FAT and then copy the Win98Cd onto it for the install.

that way it cant say it cant find the partition.... its using it and it shouldnt need to reformat it ....

whatever if it starts saying it needs to reformat STOP//


Different subversions of win98 act differently.... some are upgrade only and others wont install if they find abn OS on the partition ...

after its all finished you can boot with mandy CD in rescue mode and redo lilo remembering to add the win partition.

You don't have to "upgrade" to restore lilo, you can go into rescue mode with CD1 (press F1 when you get the first screen and enter "rescue" at the prompt) and use that to restore lilo.

in case you use 98 for more than games......you do realize it is no longer supported and you can not get updates any longer for 98, don't you?

Out of about 15 games for my kids, only 1 will not work in xp. For 2 of the 15, I had to cp the cdrom to the hd so they would run from the hd. One of those 2 still ask for the cd, the other does not. The one that does not had a hd install option from an exe when I browsed the cd.

Win98se is still my first primary so the one game is there, along with PM8, nero and a few other tools I have the install+updates backed up so that I no longer need to worry about the updates even though its firewalled/blocked from the net/internet.

Oh, and win98 has to be the first primary fat for install.

Just a note, be sure to use 98, and not me. me will try to dog the hard drive, where as 98 was still normal.

Yeah its 98se, not Me. Ad you can still get updates, Microsoft changed their policy, since they didn't get a lot of people upgrading when they "announced" that they would no longer be supporting 98 98se and that Me supoort would end soon. Now you have until 2006 (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?pr=LifeAn1 ) .

Support, on the other hand, now you have to pay for that.

Just uninstall the bootloader for mandrake, install 98, and then reinstall it. That way everyone is happy

thx for the update and correction!

I use Partition Commander with System Commander Personal Edition for this very reason. I have mandy put lilo/grub in the first sector of the root partition and SCPE finds it with no problem. I use Partition Commander for my partitioning needs.