Daniel,

I guess the whole point of PartitionMagic is to fill some holes in Windows by supporting dynamic repartitioning. It sounds as though I could postpone the use of Ghost + PartitionMagic, since it will not care what I've already installed on C: whenever I decide to go ahead and repartition. I did some searching on Google Groups where PartitionMagic came up a number of times, but there were indications it might not work properly with Windows 2000 Professional. Maybe that has changed in their more recent releases. I wonder if you or anyone else has first hand experience with PartitionMagic and its compatibility with Win2K Pro.

I'm sold on your advice about partitioning to make backups and maintenance easier. Eventually I'll look into NTFS, but that sounds like something that can wait. I believe that Wind2K Pro supports an easy way to convert a partition from FAT to NTFS. Not sure if it supports the reverse, though.

Thanks again for you very helpful replies.

Mike

>Michael,
>
>If you want to use an imaging tool then a second partition makes the creation of an image much easier and faster in my opinion. Because you cannot save an image to the same partition, you need to put the image on another drive such as a CD-RW or a Jaz drive. You need to have the necessary DOS-drivers in order to have access to external drives. While it's possible, I prefer to do it in two steps.
>
>I'm not sure if you can repartition your HD without loosing data using native Win2K tools. PartitionMagic offers this feature and much more. You can always resize your partitions without data loss. You can also convert FAT32 partitions to NTFS and vice versa.
>
>Another habit I have is to keep software setups, updates, drivers, etc. on my D:\ drive. This allows me to quickly restore anything added since the last image-snapshot. Otherwise, it can be quite time consuming and tedious to remember all the tools, drivers, etc and to recollect them from the internet, CDs, etc.
>
>Have fun with your new toy ;-)
>
>>>I'm inclined to follow your suggestion about using disk images to backup before major installations, but I presume some preliminary steps are needed before I can even do that. It's not entirely clear to me what preparations are necessary, how much I can do with Windows 2000 Professional by itself, and how much more I can do with with Partition Magic (and when).
>
>Using Win2K Pro's Disk Management facility, I don't see any way to simply create a new partition (or "extended partition"), and I don't know if the concept of "logical drives" is applicable for disk imaging purposes. It appears that Win2K Pro alone can't just create a new disk partition without my having to do a clean reinstall of Windows and all of the preinstalled programs. Do I need to physically repartition the disk to use a tool like Norton Ghost? Could I use Partition Magic at some later date to do the partitioning, after installing a bunch of stuff on my present monolithic C: drive, without having to reinstall what's been installed so far?
>
>Since my machine is starting out in a clean state that can be reconstructed from the Dell-supplied CDs, I'm willing to take the modest risk of installing a fair number of familiar "safe" apps before I take my first snapshot and begin using the machine seriously. I'm trying to understand if Partition Magic would make it possible for me to postpone repartitioning, if that is indeed necessary at all. It's going to be a while before I need to worry about optimal utilization of disk space or performance on this new machine.
>
>I will follow the advice from you and Cindy about doing VFP version installations from oldest to newest. The part I'm still struggling to figure out is what to do first, before I get to the FoxPro installations. Thanks very much for your helpful advice.<<