Clean Install of XP Home

Have just re-installed XP Home and in the process "had a shot" at partitioning off a section for the XP installation and it seems I have made a booboo somewhere as my 40Gb HD now registers as 1.17Gb

I am quite happy to do a fresh installation but in the process would like to be able "for my first time" to have XP Home set up seperately on a formatted section if there is an advantage in doing so.

Perhaps someone could enlighten me where I went wrong when provided with the opportunity to format in the re-install process.

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Operating System System Model
Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 1 (build 2600) No details available
Processor a Main Circuit Board b
2.00 gigahertz Intel Pentium 4
8 kilobyte primary memory cache
512 kilobyte secondary memory cache Board: ASUSTeK Computer INC. P4B533 REV 1.xx
Bus Clock: 100 megahertz
BIOS: Award Software, Inc. ASUS P4B533 ACPI BIOS Revision 1008 08/06/2002
Drives Memory Modules c,d
1.26 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
343 Megabytes Hard Drive Free Space

HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-4120B [CD-ROM drive]
SONY DVD-ROM DDU1611 [CD-ROM drive]
3.5" format removeable media [Floppy drive]

ST340016A [Hard drive] (40.02 GB) -- drive 0, s/n 3HSBCQ96, rev 3.75, SMART Status: Healthy 1280 Megabytes Installed Memory

Slot 'DDR 1' has 256 MB
Slot 'DDR 2' has 1024 MB
Slot 'DDR 3' is Empty
Local Drive Volumes

c: (NTFS on drive 0) 1.26 GB 343 MB free

 

I assume you are asking whether partitioning the drive into several partitions is a good idea.
Yes.
You can have windows on one c partition and your data or programs on other.
That way if windows has to be redone or goes down you take away the chances of data destruction - it is all there.
About your 1 gig reading - it is odd.
I wonder what file format you are using.
Fat 16 has such a limitation.
Seems as the default for windows xp install is ntsf . I do not even know how it is possible to install windows xp on such a small registered drive.