Good o' Ed to the rescue!!! :)

If you're using FAT16 partitions, you do not have to reformat - NT can work with FAT16 partitions.

My home PC came pre-loaded with Win95, I've never done anything with partitions, so I guess I probably have FAT16? How can I tell?

You may want to reformat in any case if you want to change how the drive is partitioned.

At this point I don't know enough to have a reason to change how it's partitioned (which BTW the HD is setup as 1 big drive). And I have no desire to do a dual boot scenario. The reason I'm looking at loading NT is 1)I'm sick-n-tired of not knowing jack about NT when I have problems with my machine at work. & 2)I want to play with IIS, MSMQ, and have a more reliable environment for my VS tools.

Realize that any WinAPps installed under Win9x will need to be reinstalled once NT is put in place; there is no tool to cenvert the Win9x registry to a WinNT registry.

I figured that much, I dont have a problem with re-installing all my software. But I have tons of files, docs, ect. that I don't want to loose - AND at this point I dont have any kind of backup device (thus my reformat question was in regards to figuring out if I need to go buy a tape/zip/jazz drive in addition to my own copy of NT workstation). Thanks Ed!