PP, i'm guessing that you have currently a single hard drive that currently has 2 partitions on it - one for the OS (C: ) and one for data (D: ). You can set this up to have 2 OS partitions, and selectively boot from either. You can also make sure that whichever OS you boot from, the other one will be hidden, and you will still only hav C: and D:

The tool of choice is Partition Magic by PowerQuest, which allows you to re-partition on the fly and preserve the data on the disk. But, of course, BACK UP everything anyway. You may be able to find a demo that is fully functional?

In PM resize your existing partitions to create some space in between the two, ie... OS/Blank space/Data. Create a new partition in the blank space, it will need to be large enough for a fresh install of XP, and it must be a Primary partition (not extended/logical).

Select the new partition, and make it the Active partition. As soon as you complete this last step, PM will restart your machine. When you restart, it will not boot, as the empty partition is active, and your OS is now hidden (if you used a boot diskette, you would see a blank C: drive, and your data on D: ). So you can now do a fresh install of XP, making sure that it selects your new blank partition to install to.

All going well, you should end up with a clean copy of XP. You will probably still be able to see the other OS partition (possibly as D: or E: ). You can't change your OS drive letter (hopefully C: ), but you can change the other 2... once again in Partition Magic, right-click the partition, select advance->change drive letter... In this example, you might want to change your existing OS to be hidden (for the drive letter, select 'none'), and then you can change your data drive from E: back to D:.

To select which OS to boot, most modern BIOS's have a boot menu available - on my machine as it first boots, i can press F11 to bring up a menu HD1, HD2, Floppy, CD etc. You can also set up your BOOT.INI file to give you a boot menu (try googling that). Or if you get stuck you can use PM to change the active partition.

If you can't get partition magic (or similar tool), you will have to trash the entire drive and use something like fdisk to re-format it.

Lastly and most importantly... back up EVERYTHING that is important.

Good Luck.

Norville, thanks for your detailed response. Actually my new computer (which I will be picking up tomorrow) does have 2 Seagate SATA drives. I assume that the process you outlined will still be applicable to my setup. Thanks again.