Arkroyal - I can understand your perceived need to reformat and re-install the software you need (a Good Idea every 12 - 18 months anyway). But I don't understand why you want to partition.
Once upon a time, I too thought it would be a Good Idea to partition my hard disk, but it turned out to be a king sized pain in the ass - I was constantly fiddling with the partitions to squeeze something more in to one partition, and then a little bit more in another partition ... And although the thinking was to have the O/S in one partition, App S/W in another, and data in a third, and the fourth was exactly the same size as a CD-ROM, it never quite worked out that way (for example, some apps insisted on having their associated data in their own directory)...
So for what it's worth, unless you have a very good reason indeed for partitioning, I would strongly recommend that you don't ...
[ 11 November 2001: Message edited by: Feline ]