I have a new XP disk but I am not going to install it if I can't get to my W/98 machines.

Files should be no problem, programs may be. Some will not work with xp. If you are talking about sharing across a network, same rules apply. If you are installing XP on a older W98 computer, I recommend you ether reformat the drive (NTFS) and fresh install XP or take your current drive and use it as a second drive and install a new drive for XP. I never recommend an upgrade (disk), you are asking for trouble.

I was also wondering about that. I have copied my W98 system to another drive and I will probably do a hardware dual boot system (flipping the address bits on the drive with a switch). I already do this on my DOS/W98 machines I use for jukeboxes.

Other than a little more efficient use of disk space, is there any compelling reason to use NTFS

Before my 98SE machine failed, I was getting files back and forth OK. I just couldn't print from the 98 machine because it wasn't compatible with the HP printer driver. Until I set the XP folder options to use simple file sharing, I couldn't look into the XP other than seeing it on the network. Every solution resulted from typing the exact error msg text into a Google search.(within quotes)
Joe

There are two problems with not using NTFS.

FAT32 volumes can only be sized up to 32 GB during XP installation. XP can work with large FAT partitions, but cannot create them.

FAT32 has a file size limit of 4 GB. This is an issue if you are making video files, converting a DVD to MPEG, or anything else that may result in a single very large file.

On the networking issue: I think when you run the wizard to set up a network on your XP machine, you will be prompted on whether you want to create a network setup disk for your machines with older operating systems.

OK the setup disk thing is good to know.
I doubt I will be making any 4 hour movies anytime soon so I am going to hold off on the NTFS for now. I will probably be using both systems on this machine for a while since I have so much stuff that probably will not run on XP. In fact I really only have 2 applications that need it and one is not really important to me.
I may migrate my shared files, weather station and fax to my wife's machine since that one is always on and she just plays Mahjong and Solitaire on it with an occasional shopping trip. I doubt she will even notice.

You can share files between W98 and XP, as I did this quite often.
Not sure if the "Home Version" of XP will, but the "Professional Version" did.

Only thing is there is an incredible latency when accessing the W98 machine from the XP machine.
I had to not map the W98 drive automatically at login, because it made everything halt for a good minute after sucessful login.

Even if I read the W98 drive via network connections, it had endless wait states before you could see anything.

It was a lot of fun printing to that machine! Took eons to print large heavy documents, and freaked out the application a bit while the print job progressed.

Funny thing is, there was very minimal latency logging onto the XP machine's Shared Directories from the W98 machine!

Security issues maybe?

BTW, the XP machine's File System was NTFS and the W98 machine's was - of course, FAT32

If you dual boot XP (using NFTS) and 98 on the same machine, XP will be able to see the 98 (fat32) drive and files, but 98 will not be able to see the XP NFTS drive or files.