hi all,my old HDD of 2 yrs 3 mths died on me and now i have to get a new HDD, anyway i wanted to know if i needed to partition the drive or can i simply format it and then install Win98SE straight on top of it?thx!

how big is the new drive? You should be able to partition it however my 80GB in Windows 2000 won't do Fat32 without Linux to partition it for me....worst case you may need partition magic or another utility to get beyond the MS limitation

Yes, you need to partition the drive. I recommend not making any FAT32 partition over 10GB. The reason for that is the cluster sizes get to big and end up with a lot of wasted space on your hardrive. See this for an explanation - http://www.xmission.com/~comphope/fat32.htm .