How to Build Your Own PC - Save A Buck And Learn A Lot  9  Chapter 9: Installing Windows XP       9  Partitioning and Formatting the Hard Drive

Partitioning and Formatting the Hard Drive 1 Partitioning for Multiple Operating Systems

The screen in Figure 136 asks us how much of the drive we want to use to create the partition. Notice that at this point your keypad numbers will not work, and you’ll need to use the numbers above the letter keys. That’s normal. Also, you can use the backspace key to delete the default number, which is just the maximum size of a partition on your hard drive.

We’ll make the partition 40 GB (about 40000 MB) or about half the available space. That’s plenty of space for what we intend to do, and we’ll be using the other half of the drive to install Linux later to give us a dual boot operating system.

If you plan to use only one operating system, or if you have a smaller hard drive and need all the space, you can go ahead and use all available space for the Windows partition and then make that correspond to the C:\ drive. The default number shown for creating the partition is the maximum size of your drive. Just hit ENTER to create this maximum-sized partition if you plan to install Windows XP as the only operating system.

Partitioning and Formatting the Hard Drive 1 Partitioning for Multiple Operating Systems