I have a 250 gig drive I want to split into two drives. Can I boot on the
XP CD and format both partitions before I install XP on C:? I would like
to format both, boot on the CD and install XP
Boot the XP CD direct. Enter Setup, and after the license agreement
take New Install. When it asks you to confirm where, hit ESC; select
and delete any current partition and make a new RAW one to be formatted
at the next stage, choosing an appropriate size for C:. I would keep
its size down to enough for the system and third party software - 16GB
should be enough.
Once the system is up and running, go to Control Panel - Admin Tools -
Computer Management, select Disk Management and look lower right for the
graphic of the drive. R-click in Unallocated space and Create
Partition.
You need to do a little planning first - it might be an idea to have a
further split of a modest partition for regular documents that need
backup, and a large one for things like movies, major graphics and the
like. The limits are that you can have at most four 'primary'
partitions. If you think you would want more, make an Extended
partition (one from the four) of the rest of the disk, then in that
r-click in the Free space to make Volumes - you can have as many of
those as you like provided you don't run beyond letter Z
