Only my repair partition is FAT. Everything else is NTFS.
I think it's essential to keep a small FAT partition (nowadays
"small" can be pretty big). You want to be able to boot at
least DOS because of the repair facilities available from DOS.
NTFS is one; partition magic is another; the NT boot sector
repair utility (from the NT resource kit) is a third. IMHO
these are must haves. I probably should have more tools,
but I've limped along with these.
I keep DOS, Win 3.11, Win 95, and my emergency NT all on
a single 500 mb FAT partition. I do have nominal need to
support legacy Win 3.11 products, but in truth I haven't had
to use it for that for years (and I have an old clunker
in the basement still running Win 3.11 all day every day).
But I've DARN well used DOS to
make repairs, often going into Win 3.11 to do file copies,
text edits, etc. They're kind of like my old Volkswagon --
not flashy or particularly comfortable, but by God I can
make 'em RUN.
Total overhead is Win 3.11+DOS 20mb; Win 95
90 mb; NT 99mb. At 4cents/meg this costs me 80 cents for
Dos and Win 3.11 and another 4 bucks for Win 95 <G>.
*&^%^*& Turbo Tax wouldn't even run on NT this year,
so I had to boot up 95 to do my taxes. Intuit is definitely
off my Valentine card list for next year. The point is,
though, you never know what you'll need and the cost is
relatively small.
BTW, it's probably important to keep the FAT partition as
partition 0 on physical drive 1 (the default boot partition).
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