i am planing to format my pc soon and i am going to try something i have not done b4 partiton the drive off so from my 74.52 gb c: 10.52GB Windows D: 20GB Programs E: 44GB Documents n Downloads etc when it comes to formatting how do i go about doing this cus normally i leave it whole The simplest solutions are the best and they are often save you money

Yeah follow the instructions below as they're better than mine.

Boot up with your windows XP CD. After you have press F8 to agree to the terms and conditions you will be presented with the setup menu. The next step is to delete existing partitions, (not required for new hard drives). Select a partition (or the only partition) and press "D" to delete the selected partition. Press "ENTER" if you are sure you want the partition deleted. When prompted to confirm, press "L" to confirm deletion. Repeat for as many partitions that you wish to delete. Now select "C" to create a partition. You will be asked to specify a size which you will enter in. Repeat for as many partitions that you wish to create. NOTE you only need to really create the OS partitions here as you can do the rest of the partitions post install if you want. Finally select the partition you want to load XP on and enter to continue. You will be presented with a format options screen. Make your choice of partition type. I recommended NTFS for the system partition, but you can also use FAT32. Make your decision using the arrow keys and press enter. The hard drive will now format. The rest is as normal when you first install XP. If you want install guides, they are available via this site. Look at the menu options on the left hand side of this websites pages. Once the install completes and you are logged into XP, you need to format the other partitions that you created (or create and format if you left the create for later). Enter disk management in one of the following three ways: Start > Right Click on My Computer & select manage OR Control Panel > Performance & Maintenance > Administrative Tools > Computer Management OR Start-Run and enter "diskmgmt.msc" (without the quotes). Then Select Disk Management from the resulting windows In the resulting windows you will have a graphical representation of your partitions. Right click on each one of the unformatted partitions and select format and make your format choices as required and wait for the partition to be formatted. Repeat for other unformatted partitions. NOTE - You do not need to create all the partitions at the beginning. You can just create the one on which you are going to install the OS. The rest can be created and formatted via disk management similar to above. ___________________________________________ ☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.

Also, I'd want to mention that it may be not a good idea to create programs partition separately: a lot of applications ask to be installed on the system partition only.