>I have a dual boot: 1st physical drive 2.1GB with 4 X 500 MB FAT partitions, 2nd physical drive 6.4GB NTFS. Win95 on C, WinNT on D (2nd drive). Which one is the boot partition here for NT? C or D?

In normal terms, the boot sector and loader are on the C: drive (the active primary partition of the first physical drive holds the boot record and loader; this is the partition that's limited to a 4GB maximum size by NT's loader. In NT terminology, this is the system partition. The boot sector and loader must be on a primary partition formatted under FAT12, FAT16 or NTFS, with a maximum size of 4GB. It can't participate in a stripe set; I'm not absolutely certain about limitations on participating in a volume set. it can be a mirrored partition. NTLOADER, BOOT.INI and a few other files, as well as the NT bootstrap loader reside on this partition.

In NT terminology, the operating system itself resides on the boot partition - this can be any partition type and size supported by the base drivers loaded by NT's loader, pulled in during the bootstrap process.

In the case you cite above, the system partition is C:, but the boot partition where the operating system files live is your D: drive. Your logical drive letters should be assigned as follows by NT unless you've altered the assignments with Disk Administrator:

1st drive, primary partition, FAT16 - C: (system)
2nd drive, primary partition, NTFS - D: (boot)
1st drive, 1st logical drive extended partition, FAT16 - E:
1st drive, 2nd logical drive extended partition, FAT16 - F:
1st drive, 3rd logical drive extended partition, FAT16 - G:

any mountable drives (CD, Zip, etc.) would follow unless altered.

Under Win95, the NTFS partition is invisible unless you mount it after boot using something like NTFSDOS.

Hope my less than MS-defined terminology didn't confuse things for you too much; i was careless about the exact meaning of Boot and system partitions. In the case cited, both the boot and system partitions were the same, and under anything but NT speak, calling it the boot drive is clear and understandable. The confusion over exactly which drive is which is one of the main reasons that NT's boot manager falls back to the nearly-universally accepted ARC notation for specifying exactly which partition on which disk is being referenced. Unfortunately, most people haven't had to0 deal with ARC notation, so it's less than clear without a whole lot of explanation.

Ed

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>Vlad
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>>>I am new to NT, I had a 6.4G of hardisk space which I hope to convert from FAT16 to NTFS. I had tried to use disk administrator without any successful in converting the current 2G of FAT16 to 6.4G of NTFS diskspace.
>>>Unless I use partition magic to do. Did I miss out any thing, please advise how can I change it from 2G of FAT16 to 6.4G of NTFS. Thank in advance.
>>
>>Your boot partition under NT cannot be larger than 4GB; it's a limitation of the loader, even though NTFS will support huge partition sizes. You can convert your existing partition from FAT to NTFS using the NT command line utility CONVERT; to change to NTFS, enter the command:
>>
>>CONVERT C: /FS:NTFS
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>>You'll need to reboot after running CONVERT. Once the drive is converted to NTFS, you can expand it by creating a Volume Set using the Disk Administrator tool. Your system partition is limited to a 4GB size, For details on alternatives in allocating disk space, you might want to check John Savill's NT FAQ
>>
>>Partition Magic will allow you to make a contiguous, single NTFS volume of maximum supportable size without the need to create a volume set.