Partitioning new hard drive

[buddydeano]

My old hard drive died and will be installing XP pro on a new 40g hard drive.I would like to partion the drive, do I partition before installing xp or after? using Partition Magic V7.

TIA

[satis]

partition prior. It's safer that way. I'm curious, is there any reason you want to use partition magic? I believe the XP installation allows you to partition your drive as you want. The main advantage to partition magic is you can partition without killing existing data (which you apparently don't have at this point).

[(jj)]

Partion magic is a good utility when you need to resize or change partitions after you have data already on your drive. But I always caution those that use it because if you lose your main partition (boot partition) later on, you can lose everything. Partition Magic stores it's info in the boot sector and if that becomes corrupt then you can not access any of the other partitions created or changed with PM. At least with standard partitioning, if you lose your boot sector you can still access the other partitions to salvage your data.

[buddydeano]

Solved & Thanks