Can I do this?

[Menno Hershberger]

I have a hard drive with 5 partitions.
XP Home edition is on drive C: and I have XP-Pro on drive D.
The other partitons are for storage. ALL partitons are now FAT32.
I have downloaded the Vista Home Premium upgrade from Circuit City.
I want to upgrade partiton 1 (Home Edition) to Vista.
This means, of course, that partition will be converted to NTFS.
Will I have any problems doing this and keeping the other 4 partitons
intact?
And, of course, have the option to boot into the XP-Pro partiton?

 

[LaRoux]

This should work fine as you have laid it out. I assume the 2 XP
installations are setup to dual boot now. When you complete the Vista
installation, you should get a new boot menu with the old XP Pro
installation available.

As far as the FAT32 partitions go, can I ask why you don't convert all of
them to NTFS? You should notice better performance, reliability, and
security. Just a thought.

 

[Menno Hershberger]

I have three computers networked together, and I like to be able to make
changes on any of them *from* any of them. In system folders or anywhere
I want. I am the only one here so security isn't a problem. It is almost
impossible to configure NTFS to allow all that. I am only installing
Vista to "learn" it since I will have to be working on computers with
Vista installed. For the time being, XP will continue to be my "working"
system. Laplink automatically synchronizes all my important folders every
morning at 3:30 AM between the 3 computers. Any data I generate in Vista
(including My Documents) will be stored on another drive so it'll get in
on the synching.
I did get Vista installed this morning. One of my first priorities is to
find out what's making it so ungodly SLOW!

Thanks for your assurances... it worked fine.

 

[LaRoux]

Assuming you are a local administrator across all three systems with
duplicate user IDs and passwords on each, will mapping a drive to
\\computername\C$ (or whatever drive you want) not give you complete control
on that drive?

 

[Menno Hershberger]

It might. I've tried just about everything everyone threw at me. My first
two XP installations were both upgrades from Windows 98 so they were in
Fat32 format from the start. For a while there was a 98 machine in the mix.
The last one came with XP and NTFS. It didn't play nice with the others, so
I reformatted it in Fat32 and reinstalled Windows.
I don't mess with passwords when I can get out of it.