[Capt. Tom]

Whatever you do, DO NOT have XP convert your hard drive to NTFS format. If it does, the OS cannot be uninstalled and the only way to undo the NTFS format is to have the drive reformatted

I asked my computer friend to translate this for me and here is his answer. - Tom

This sentence is out of context. What were they talking about? NTFS is a drive format only supported by WinNT, Win2000 and WinXP. Win95 98 ME can't deal with it.

If one was to upgrade a Win98 system to WinXP you wouldn't convert your hard drive. If you did a clean install of XP you would want NTFS. About the only time one wouldn't use NTFS is if you have a hard drive with multiple partitions and multiple operating systems. If one of the bootable operating systems was for example Win98 it would not be able to read the data in a WinXP NTFS partition.

This probably confuses you more, ask me over coffee.

[Paul Atreides]

Here's the deal:

I had my system built almost three years ago. At the time, I was using Win98. I supplied the new hard drive and had them install it when they built the system. Shortly after, I upgraded to ME. Then, shortly after XP came out, I upgraded to XP, but never told the install to convert the hard drive to NTFS.