i have a bunch of crap on my comp and want to format hte HD....usin xp home...can i delete teh partition and make a couple new ones and will that automatically split my hard drive into drives or do i need software to do that...i want my hard drive to have l ike 5 drives...school...mnbc......music...games...other. ..is this possible w/ o buying software?

It'* on the XP home disk before you reformat. But you lose all info that you have on whatever partitions you are formatting. If you want to save what you have now, you can re-partition with software like Partition Magic. But if you are reformatting then just use the XP disc.

can i get multiple drives though?

Partition magic comes with some boot disks that you can boot with before you install, to set up partitions. It'* really easy.

i dont want to purchase software...can i do it on the dos partition thing?

I'm drawing a blank. I think you can make multiple partitions during the WIndows install..... I THINK???!

That sounds right, I recall when installing XP something about setting up mulitple drives :?

not sure about with xp, but i know you can with a 98sec bootdisk from www.bootdisk.com

I'm not sure if it'* included on XP Home, but yes, FDISK will allow you to set up multiple partitions that Windows will see as seperate drives.

Don't ask me for details, though, I've never done this with XP

But you wanna use NTFS, dos can't even read that, let alone partition it. Use the XP boot disk.