Is there anything on the AV5100 harddrive vital to play?

[TynoPrime]

Ok, terrible topic title I admit, It was kinda hard to come up with one. My problem/question is this.

I intend to use the archos as... How should I put it... A portable windows? So that I can plug it into my laptop and boot from the archos. Everything would suggest this is possible, as Windows Setup sees the archos as a 100gb FAT32 harddrive. Now, when it's plugged into my computer as a normal USB drive, I only see it as a 92.8gb harddrive, which leads me to beleive that several gigs are taken up by the archos operating system.

Is this the case?

If I format the drive in windows setup, this will leave it COMPLETELY blank. I need to know if there are vital system files on the drive that I need to keep? Because if that's the case I should be able to just remove all my video/music files and install windows without formatting the drive.
If I decide to do that instead, which would make sense as there's no need in formatting unless absolutely nessessary, will the windows files interfere with Archos functionality? Or could I, once finished with windows, just delete the Windows/Program files/Boot.ini and carry on as normal?

Any help would be appreciated.

Regards

Gordon

[BUC]

If you format the Archos HDD you will be having a non usable Archos... and this will kill the purpose of the player....

If you want a portable windows on a hard drive I strongly suggest to buy a portable HDD that are really cheap these days... and keep using the Archos for what it is....

The missing GB is due to makers stating you have a "100 GB HDD" which is not entirely true... because what they are really selling is 100 gb that is the equivalent of 93.13 GB and the missing 0.33 is the actual Archos software... this is because bytes are increment of 1024 on binary numbers... instead of 1000...

And for Gigabytes the size difference is closed to 7.37% of what its said...

My 160 GB computer is actually 149 GB...

[kb]

Everything would suggest this is possible, as Windows Setup sees the archos as a 100gb FAT32 harddrive.

The Archos firmware does not expose to the host computer that USB functionality that is needed to get to the boot record. It only looks like a 100Gb (or whatever it is) USB disk so long as the host computer doesn't probe too closely. I'd be quite surprised if you can boot from it. Still, I'm prepared to be surprised.