>Second of all, if you are using FAT32, you are also out of luck. NT 4 can not read FAT32 drives.
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From the standpoint of booting NT, you're right, but Winternals now has a driver for NT permitting it read/write access to FAT32 partitions; the system partition can't be FAT32, but the boot partition can (for people not familiar with NT terminology, the system partition is where the NT loader and base driver set resides; the boot partition is where the NT operating system itself actually live. The system partition has to be addressible and accessible through the BIOS; the BIOS ability to handle the boot process is what can force the system partition to be as small as 2GB (in fact, if there's no support for any disk mode other than as specified by the original AT BIOS support for physical drive geometry, it can be forced to be even smaller on very old IDE-based systems) or may require the use of boot sector overlay drivers like supplied with utilities like DiskManager, DriveRocket and MaxBlast.) The problem is NT's loader, which relies on BIOS services up until enough of NT loads to allow the use of NT device drivers and services; the loader for Win2K is considerably different.
>You're best bet (IMO) is to decrease the size of the boot partition and install Win2K instead. It can utilize FAT32 drives. If that is not an option, Partition Magic can convert your drive format for you without losing any data. Convert it to FAT and install NT 4.
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You need PM 5 - PM 4 didn't have the necessary tools to let you do this without backing up and restoring. One of the biggest improvements in PM 5 is the ability to rearrange allocations dynamically without having to back up - before, the need to convert a FAT32 primary partition into a logical volume of an extended partition, allocating a new bootable FAT16 primary partition required an external backup and restore. I'd still back up before messing around with rearranging the partitions IAC.
Given the price of drives, and the fact that it's going to be tough to sharing things between NT and Win98 without third-party drivers where FAT32 and NTFS are involved, it might make better sense to have two separate hard drives, each with their own OS on them, with an easy way to swap them. Both CSC (
www.corpsys.com) and Dirt Cheap Drives (
www.dirtcheapdrives.com) sell systems that make if feasible to mount IDE drives in a cage that allows simple swapping of drives just like a removable cartridge drive like Iomega's Jaz drive. THe setup is simple enough; a drive mount cage is installed in the PC, and each drive is installed in a removable mount that slides in and locks, and makes all the necessary power and data connections. If you want to spend the money, they sell versions that allow hot-swapping drives. Dirt Cheap Drives sells a number of models of the DataPort product line, which range from about $60 for a DataPort IV mounting frame and one installable cartridge mount, with each added cartridge mount costing ~$35, and going up in price from there - including really high-end RAID enclosures with hot-swappable Ultra160-capable SCSI version if you are willing to part with the cash. I've used the DataPort products successfully in the past; I've gotten in the habit of mounting the boot drive of most of my client's servers in one, to make it easy to keep a spare, pre-configured boot drive on-hand at their site. It's cheap insurance that can make recovering a dead system much easier - even though the spare system disk is out-of-date realtive to their current data and app and OS patches, they have a drive that can be swapped, and has a known, functioning copy of the server NOS and enough software pre-installed, to at least get the server up and running and ready to restore from their last backup without having to open the case.
