Ok, basically atm I'm clearing out my second harddrive in this machine to use as a temporary drive in my new pc. The only thing is that atm my swap partition is stored on it and my primary drive is partitioned as this 10.1 install and FAT32 remains of Win98 and stored documents.
I need to either run this install without a swap partition or safely slice some space from the primary drive to use as swap for now before it's moved over to the new pc once it's booting ok.
Is it possible to run without swap? I have 256Megs RAM in here but sometimes things swap a little with less than even 128megs usage. My RAM is normally never fully used or swapping hard, so could I get by without for a bit?
Or can I somehow gain space from the FAT32 partition which takes the remains of the disk? Would I somehow have to defrag it before slicing a bit off the end, and can I add a new partition when I already have 2 which must not be lost.

Depending on what you're doing, you can run without swap - under some circumstances, I have. (Similar deal, where my swap was on hdb and I moved hda to a different computer so, naturally, had no swap.) Also, I don't know what tools Mandrake has (I assume we're talking Mandrake here) but, yeah, you should be able to cut another partition, and you do need to defrag (maybe more than once) to compact it as much as possible. Problem is, Windows often insists on sticking files near the end, regardless of defragmenting. But you could try.

Another option, if you have room on the main drive, is to create a swap file. That would probably be easiest and safest and it would only cost a major performance reduction if you did actually need to use it.

*Is booted without swap atm*

As I say atm there isn't a windows install on this machine so how might I go about defragging the partition so I know nothing's at the end before I lop some off, or is it not worth it now?

I think I misread the question - when you said 'remains' I thought you meant 'junk I don't use any more' but I thought the Windows partition was still usable. I assume there's no way to either copy the data to a nix partition or to shunt the data off to removable media? Then you wouldn't have to worry with partitioning carefully (I mean, 'carefully' as far as preserving the FAT data) and could create your swap, a smaller FAT, if you want, and putting the data back. I also somewhat misunderstood the 'get by without it for a bit'. You want to permanently run Mandrake without swap? I thought you were just moving the drive to the new box for awhile and wanted to still be able to access your current box during that time. My fault - should have got clearer on the situation. So what *is* the situation? If you're safely booted and running and have the drive on the new box, then I'd figure it wasn't worth anything extreme at this point to get a swap partition but I also wouldn't want to run Linux permanently without a swap.

Ok here's things as they are atm:

Primary drive of current pc:
Mandrake 10.1 install without swap, FAT32 containing My Documents, uni work, downloads, music, etc.

Secondary drive of current pc:
Partitions which had contained Mdk9.2, partitions which contain 10.0 with some data yet to keep (ie move to the FAT32 for now).

I dont have a flash drive big enough to keep all my data, I could burn it to cds-I probably will for the stuff really worth backing up.
I plan to move all data to the FAT32 partition so I can finally wipe the second drive and use it as the primary in the new pc. Eventually the larger drive will follow over once the new pc is established with a dual boot of WinXP and Mdk10.1 or MdkLE2005. Then I'll transfer the FAT32 data to the smaller drive and finally format the old Mdk10.1&FAT32 to store my games and data, or maybe have it as XP+FAT32 so the primary is purely linux.

Edit: Or I could just use this ~£50 I just got from my dad to get a new 80gig IDE drive+new logitech keyboard&gel wrist rests.
Moral of the story: Always always plan for your monitor to break at any moment and cost you £80 for a replacement 17" CRT...

As far as additional hard drives, I'd really recommend an external hard drive. I hate messing with CDs and smaller storage - with the external drive, I can keep a pretty current, easy backup of anything important. So if I had to, I could wipe any internal drive I've got without worrying much about anything.

But, yeah, it sounds like you'll get it done. If you need it, a swap file will fix things to at least keep working until it's all squared away.