[andrewas]

Larry, XP installation is one of the few things ive never done. XP repair yes, a little, but never installed. Was planning to be doing it today actualy, but turns out XP wont run on my current computer.

In general though, upgrades are evil. There will be parts of 98 left all over your system, and the fat32 filesystem isnt all that efficient. Far better to format and start from scratch.

Me, Id run a triple boot system. winXP, win98 and mandrake 8.1 , but thats hardly a normal setup.

On booting from CDs - if your machine is new enough to run XP you will be able to boot from CD - but youll have to go into BIOS (check your system manual, but normally you hit delete during the memory test at poweron) and alter the boot sequence to read "cdrom,c,a" instead of the usual default "c,a,SCSI". I woudnt leave it like that, cdrom boot takes a while and will slow down system start as long as its enabled.