A superb answer thanks, I will keep a copy of this for future reference.
Just two further points, if I dual boot with W98SE
and XP I assume from what you have already stated
that this will still apply even if I use Fat32 with XP.
Only when booting Win98SE. XP does the allocation
of letters differently and thats completely independant
of how the partitions are formatted, its an OS feature,
not a dependant on the partition formatting used.
I also want to add Linux which will use its own HD partition
You normally use more than one for Linux.
(I do like the Linux boot options as to what OS to boot)
I take it that it will be best to avoid trying to transfer files
between the OS's in view of the different drive orders.
Transferring files isnt a problem, the problem is with
applications and where they are installed. If they arent
installed on the boot partition for the particular OS they
are used from, varying drive lettering can be a real problem.
There are a couple of obvious ways to stop the letters varying.
One is to ensure that there is only ever a single primary
dos partition in the complete collection of drives, the
lettering of the hard drive partitions wont change with
the crudest of the OSs in that regard, Win98x, if you
deliberately fix the optical drive letters to much higher
letters will ever be used for hard drive partitions.
If you use a full horsepower boot manager, you can hide
partitions visible to particular OS boots too, so you have
quite a bit of power there letter wise when combined
with quite a bit of control over how hard drive partitions
are lettered with the NT/2K/XP family and with Linux
doing the entire approach quite differently again.
PS
I made the mistake a few years ago on a W95/98
multi drive PC and formatted the wrong drive. :-(
Yeah, I've never actually done it, I always very carefully
check which drive I am formatting when formatting.
I did get one heart stopping moment when the dos
format reported the wrong capacity for the partition
being formatted due to a dos bug and I wondered for
a moment just which partition it was actually formatting.
With hard drives now so cheap, I normally have
everything completely imaged and when installing
a new OS usually do a few images very early on
in the install, just so its effortless to step back if
you change your mind about the detail on how you
are installing the extras like drivers and apps etc.
Then you just have to be careful not to format
the drive used for the images, and thats not hard
since its normally only ever formatted when new.