XP on New HDD

I'm going to put XP Pro on a new 20 gig HDD.

Will XP format the HD or should I do a format before I put in the CD?

What about partitions?
I have Partition Magic 7
Should I make a small one say 2.5-3 Gig for OS and the rest for Apps and Data?
Any suggestions on that?

Any other recomenditions before I start?

Thanks
BobW

 

When you put the xp disk in your CD Rom...
You can use it as a boot disk...
Then during startup xp will let you create partitions and format drives with either NTFS or FAT32...
Unless you have a specific application that requires one half be on one partition and a second part of the application on a different partition I would just leave it as all on large disk.

 

As long as you have the PM 7 boot disks, you can create partitions, format , etc. using PM 7 before installing an OS.

Unless your new HD has some manufacturer specific, proprietary configuration instructions that must be followed to set up the HD, PM 7 should be all you need.

To speed up defrag times, I would create a 4G partition for Win XP and any programs you want to put there and then create separate partitions for other applications. .. if you have just one partition, running scandisk defrag will take forever to finish, partitions which contain programs that are infrequently used won't need to be defragged nearly as often as the C:\ partition so you can save yourself some time by limiting the size of C:\ .

If you get Diskkeeper 7.0 you can set up periodic disk partition defrags for whatever schedule you want... I use it to defrag my C:\ partition daily and all the others once a week... it runs in the background during defrag operations and doesn't interfere with whatever you're doing at the moment

 

Thanks for the tips.
I loaded XP yesterday had some trouble with format. I run my HD on a promise ultra 100 card and XP could not find it. Had to put HD into MB IDE plug and use fdisk to partition and format. Worked OK just PITA changing plugs around. Everything is working OK so far, except my zip drive. XP dosn't know when a disk is in the drive.
Asking to insert a disk when there is one already in. Will have to work on that today.

Bobw