When ever I have worked with PM, it has either been really easy or all sooo
bad.
Here is the first and fundamental thing you must do prior to making any
change to your system that could adversely affect it, BACK-UP your data.
I had partitioned a 20 gig HDD with PM a number of years back. About 5
months later, I decided to rebuild and formatted the primary partition. What
happened (all data was wiped on the primary and secondary HDD's). If I
hadn't backed-up the stuff on the secondary partition, I would have been
crying. After searching across the net, this seemed a common thing for PM to
do, they may have fixed it but better to be safe than sorry.
Make sure you read up on PM so that you are absolutely sure on what you are
doing!
FDisk is a great tool and really reliable (I haven't had any issues with it
apart from getting my head around it to start with). IMO, if you are going
to be messing around with partition's, it would be so much better to do so
within a command prompt (outside of Windows) as this will reduce
complications with this activity.
As to the installation of programs from your Windows 98 OS. There are a few
things to consider:
1. Installation of different language applications on a different
language OS isn't really recommended. If you have say an OS in English and
an application in Japanese, the character set is different (it's all 0's and
1's, yes but the character set that each is expecting is or / may be quite
different. Therefore, it may do things that aren't expected, which will lead
to either an unstable OS or application. If you have Spanish applications,
then I wouldn't start this with the expectation that they will work on
Windows 2000 English. It would be more like a bonus more than anything else.
2. You need to install Windows 98 first then Windows 2000 for the dual
boot to work properly (you can do it the other way around but it would just
become a nightmare to make it work as you will have to add lines into the
boot files. Rule of thumb is to start with the oldest OS and install
sequencially to the newest.
I found the following article online that maybe able to provide you some
further information.
Description of Supported Dual-Boot Configurations Between Windows 2000 and
Other Windows-Based Operating Systems
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=289283
Whilst searching for information for you I stumbled across the following so
you might want to holdfire on the PM thing and do some further research
(perhaps even contacting the PM software vendor to query if they know of
best practise stuff for their software.
Computer Stops Responding When Starting Dual Boot with PowerQuest Partition
Magic 3.x
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=284839
Good luck.
Franksta
