I agree with the Feline...Partitions are a bit of a pain. Although one good use for them is this...If you have say, a 20Gb Hard Disk, you could have a 19.5Gb main partition, with 500Mb (I know the numbers would be slightly different) as the secondary partition. You could then use the 500Mb to backup to should you need to format the main partition again.
I find it can save a lot of time....
Good Luck,
Mikey