Hard drive installation and partitioning

Go to Control Panel--> Administrative tools. Then click on Computer Management --> Disk Management. That will let you partition your drive and assign drive letters.

Well plug it in (if it's ordinary Parallel ATA you need to set master or slave)
Make sure the BIOS detects it
Go to Windows
Right click "My Computer" > Click "Manage" > Click "Disk Management"
The rest should be pretty obvious.

Make sure you have service pack 1 for WinXP or pack 3 for Win2000. Without it, you'll only be able to see 128-136g.

As far as partitions, my 250 is setup as 50, 80 and 100. The 50 for booting and the other 2 for useless stuff.

ok, thanks kane and omega.
I already have an 80g SE for booting and everything else, so I might wind up reinstalling XP so I can partition both drives.
New question now though...
Why do you have a 50 gig partition just for booting? Does having extra space on the boot partition increases speed?
edit:
thanks to captain also, guess I missed your post somehow
Just thought of something else now though. Can I partition a drive if there is already data on it, or do I have to reformat it?

>Just thought of something else now though. Can I partition a drive if there is already data on it, or do I have to reformat it?

If you want to resize a partition, a program like PQMagic is the key, but if you just want to add another partition where there isn't one (ie: you have a 60Gb drive with only a 30Gb partition on it, not if you have a 60Gb drive with a 60Gb partition that is half full) yes, you can.

ok, thanks again Kane.
Guess I'll be reformatting in the near future.