E.Z. Flyer
If your question was refering to my post then here is an answer - if not then I apologise.
I just format each hard drive and leave it as one partition. You could of course give each drive several partitions and end up with several more 'apparent' drives.
The reason for totally independent drives (3 in each computer) is to prevent a single drive failure corrupting the data in separate partitions.
One drive has the XP OS on it, another has Vista; the third has data only and no OS.
I would imagine that some sort of motherboard fault could cause corruption of data on all independent drives - hence the duplication on another entirely separate desktop computer - plus the storage on an external drive.
Might seem a bit over the top, but when you have had a spot of finger trouble as I have had in the past it is nice to know that everything is sitting switched off in four other locations.
Regards
Exeng