Reformatting XP. How much to Partition?

I'm reformatting with a brand new 250gb Hard Drive.  How much space should I partition?  I plan to use my PC to play War III, WoW, and I'm getting into Video Editing.  I also have an ATI TV Wonder, as I plan to record some console games onto my PC.  One guy recommended I partition for 4gb.  Then another one said 180gb.  He said:

"there is an active partition, and a non-active partition
besides that, there are two types of partitions:
Primary Partition (Standard, encouraged), Extended Partition (Linux mainly, boosts performance)"

So uhh... who do I listen to?

partition type is irrelevant for you. it's only for servers and people with many partitions. just do primary.

a safe size is about 10 gig, 20 if you want to install some games. 4 is possible, but you may run into temporary cache problems or pagefile or whatever. 2 is even possible if you trim your install.

but you should install the large shit to the second partition, like Steam.

I prefer to have a 3-4 gig partition to install all my programs (non-games, that is) and operation system to.  As for what to do with the rest of your unpartitioned space, it depends on a few things.  Its usually a good idea to make several partitions around 40 gigs or so.  It makes defragging your drives after you've been using them a lot easier, and I've heard that smaller partitions extend the life of your drive.  I like to have several partitions, myself, as it helps me to keep my stuff sorted out (games, partition, anime partition, music, etc).

I got a new 250GB drive recently. Did 80Gb for Windows and progs, which is probably too much, but meh - I'll use it for temp files in Photoshop, Cool Edit and Encore DVD. Don't listen to that rot about differences in performance between primary and extended partitions - any perceived difference is probably because the primary partition is made near the "start" of the disk, which generally has the highest performance (and which is where you usually install your OS and progs, which is a good thing).

>>3
smaller partitions are worse. you may be confusing it with smaller hard-drives. (3 100gigs as opposed to 1 300gig.)

your idea is organizationally sound, but performance-wise you have nothing.

I was told you can only have one partition per drive

>>6
You were told wrong.

I just partitioned for 8gb.  After installation, I've found that I have one hard drive with 8gb.  What am I doing wrong?  I guess I'll need to reformat again

>>8
Administrative Tools > Disk Manager

I'm in Administrative Tools, there is no Disk Manager

>>1
PARTITIONS EXPLAINED (oversimplified for clarity)
- partition table lives on first sector of your hard drive.
- partition table has 4 slots, each slot can hold 1 primary or 1 extended partition
- when you make a primary partition, you can use it as a drive
- extended partitions can contain one or more partitions themselves; when you want more than 4 partitions, you need to use extended partitions.  each partition within an extended partition can be used as drive.
- generally you want your first partition on the disk to be primary.  there also may be problems booting with particular operating systems from extended partitions, so you want your operating system resident on a primary partition.
- making a partition does NOT format it, you have to format the created drive in the partition before you can use it.
- how do you format a drive if you can't see it in windows because it's not formatted?  go to Start->Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Computer Management->Disk Management, you will see a graphic of your disk and partitions and can right-click the unformatted areas and manage them there.
- can't format FAT32 partition > 32GB in WinXP, this is an artificial limitation and 3rd party utilites exist to sidestep it.  you probably want NTFS anyway.
- you only have 1 8gb hard drive because the rest of the space on your hd is not assigned to a partition and also is unformatted.  do the above to fix this.

>>10

Admin tools -> Computer management -> Disk Manager