>>>I am buying a notebook with 100 Gb hard drive. I presume that the manufacturer will have just one partition, C:, when I get this notebook. I prefer to have 3 partitions of my hard drive: C:, D:, and E: (somewhat equal in size).
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>>>My question is, can I partiton the drive using built-in feature of XP Pro without uninstalling the OS and all the software that will be on the PC? Or, in order to do that, do I need to buy a commercial software for partitioning?
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>>>TIA.
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>>I don't know the answer to your partitioning question but will just say I used to think that way and have gotten over it. I used to have Windows and system utilities on C:, application software on D:, and data on E:. I finally realized the same thing can be accomplished with subdirectories of C:. And the physical risk of hard drive failure is identical.
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>I agree with you about the "risk factor". And I realize I can have a folder C:\DRIVED and kind of sort of use it instead of a separate partition. But it is "cleaner" (at least in my mind) to separate the folders and files into separate drives. In my case, I put all applications into C, all projects and support file into D, and customer data into E.

But you see, Dmitry, you are not putting the stuff is separate "drives". They are all on the same drive. But yes, you do get different drive letters.

Here's a way around that. Do a network mapping to each of the 'main drive directories'.
For example, if you have a 'main driver directory' called "DriveD", then map the directory C:\DriveD to a drive letter. Same for C:\DriveE, to a different drive letter.
Partitions, at least when NTFS is used, in my opinion make for erratic performance.