Hello folks,

I have been regularly burning to CD's drive images (PowerQuest's Drive Image 2000) of my unpartitioned workhorse Win98 10G capacity, 5G used, (don't laugh, I like it and it works for me) desktop machine, which I use for business and personal. I've never had to restore an image, I'm fastidious about maintenance, but the machine is now almost 10 years old, and, I know, sometimes a hard drive will just fail. In anticipation of this, I would like to try putting an exact copy of the Win98 drive on a new FAT32 partition on my XP laptop, to make sure I would be able to do the same onto a new desktop or laptop; call me crazy but I have tweaked the Win98 into a configuration with which I am entirely comfortable and if my old hard drive were to fail sometime sooner or later, I would want to reinstall the whole Win98 drive, not just preserve the data.

I have PowerQuest's Partition Magic and have used it to partition the XP (60G hardrive). The program CD comes with Boot Magic, in order to be able to choose which operating system into which one boots, and which I know I will also have to install ahead of time. I know I will have to create a new FAT32 partition on the XP. Partition Magic's options include "Create a new partition" of course, but also "Install a new operating system".

The other important bit of information is that I tried installing Drive Image to the XP, but that version of Drive Image doesn't seem to function with XP, so I use Acronis True Image v.8 on the XP, and on the other hand I can't seem to get True Image to make an image of the Win98 machine, so it's a bit of a conundrum.

My initial question is, should I/can I install Win98 (ie. choose to install a "new operation system", which choice I believe will automatically create the new appropriate FAT32 partition) onto the XP laptop, and then install the Drive Image Program onto that same partition, and then attempt to restore the Win98 drive image to it?. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

Chas