>Ed,
>
>When I upgrade to W2K and my 20GB drive I'll be starting from scratch. Jerry tells me that I could fire up with a W98 boot floppy if I had Fat32 but not with NTFS, which he says leaves me unrecoverable after a big crash. This is my home machine so security is less important than for some other people.
>
>But I'm thinking the answer to that is having a good backup. I'll probably be doing that by copying to the smaller drive (Fat32) each night for now.
>
>Advice?

In NT (and presumably W2K) you have the option to create "emergency recover diskettes" which are supposed to address this situation. I've never had occasion to use them, so I don't know how well they work.

Your backup idea sounds better. However, rather than merely "copying" files to your secondary hard drive, be sure to use the built-in backup applet, which is capable of backing up the registry as well. You can set your secondary HD to be the backup target.

The W2K setup CD is bootable if your system supports booting from a CD. In that case, you could boot W2K Setup, blow away your big HD, reinstall W2K, then restore from the backup on your other HD.

If you converted to NTFS on your secondary HD, you could set it to use compression, thereby letting you back up more info to it. If memory serves, the W2K backup applet doesn't support software compression.