WD hd and XP questions

[lobsterclaw]

I have a WD 120GB w/8mb and WinXP. What do I need to do to the hd before i start to install XP. Do I need to use the 3.5 disk that came with my hd or do I use FDISK? The book that came with XP said that you can only have four partitions per hd, is this true? When do you set up the partitions, before or after you install XP? Should I use FAT32 or NTFS? Thanks for your time.

[HAL9000]

Just install the drive, then boot from your XP CD. It will come to a section where you can partition and format your drive.

As for the parititions, what it means is you can only create 4 partitions before creating an extended partition which will allow you to create more than 4.

[lobsterclaw]

Should I use Fat 32 or NTFS? What are extended partitions and can I make them in XP?

[glc]

Boot with the CD and let XP Setup create your FIRST partition, and use NTFS. Once XP is installed, you use Disk Management to create the rest of your partitions.

Note that you can only have 4 "partitions" but an "extended" partition can contain many "logical drives". If XP is going to be the only OS on that drive, I would simply make 2 partitions - the primary, and an extended - then break up the extended into as many logical drives as you want. If you are going to multiboot, then a different partitioning plan may be better.