I want to partition my HDD and its my first time doing it. I tried doing some research online about it but I am really unsure so I figured I would ask for help here.

Some basics. I am running XP with a 300Gb HDD. I built this PC myself and when I set it up I just created the 1 partition, but now I want to split up the space on my HDD into 2 or 3 sections (Either 3-100 GB sections or 1-200GB and 1-100GB section)

I use my PC for a lot of music and games so I want to have those partitions to manage everything easier (Defrag purposes and stuff)

Download Cute Partition Manager and read the documentation with it. It will tell you how to create new partitions out of your existing free space on the drive. Just remember to make a backup before you do it. I recommend Acronis.

I would go with Partition Magic. You may be able to get it bundled with Norton Ghost.

The thing is you need a tool like that to resize the partitions without losing data. Otherwise you would need to delete the existing partition and then recreate the three partitions. With a partitoning utility, you would first resize the existing partition, then add additional partitions out of the unused space.

Agreed, if you have the money to spend Partition Magic is the way to go, but I still prefer Acronis over Ghost.

Very helpful advice. Money is a BIG issue right now though so I may have to either re-format my HD and partition it then, or just hold off.

I may just reformat anyway, since I was having problems with explorer.exe crashing not long ago.

You can partition it manually,first u need to format the H.D.D. remember to backup first.Then when formatting format the drive C:/,then u will have the hard drive blank windows setup will ask you if u wan to install windows look for the command which says create partition and u can create as many as you want then install windows on one of the partitions you created.

If you use PartedMagic (not Partition Magic, Google for it) it can resize your NTFS partition and create new partitions for you. It's free, open-source software.