Well, it's official, my case has gotten too crowded with three hardrives and 2 optical bays in use. So I want to get rid of my smallest, and oldest hard drive (C: drive). I want some help as to how to repartition my other drives in the best way to minimize my work and inconveniance. Here's how my computer is set up now:

C: drive 40 GB capacity, Windows XP, documents, utility programs
D: drive 60 GB capacity, Music, Videos
E: drive 160 GB capacity, Games, backup

I'd like to get rid of my C: drive, and create a new partition on my 160GB drive to hold Windows, so if the partition gets fubar'd I don't lose everything. I'm comfortable using PartitionMagic, so this shouldn't be a problem.

Questions:

Is this the best way to do this? Any better suggestions? Or am I just retarded?
What size partition should I use to install Windows on? Should I leave room for utility programs, or only make it a strict Windows partition only (performance wise)?
Any tips, suggestions, whatever?

I'm pretty sure this'll work the way I want, just want to make sure before I step off a ledge and find a stick up my ass.

Make sure the partition is ~10-15GB if you only going to put XP on there... I got into a jam making one of my system partitions 7GB (yeah, I thought it would be plenty). However, since many many programs use the registry along with extensions/libraries saved inside windows system folders, the chances of you being able to use programs after having to format your system partition will be low. Since you will most likely have to reinstall programs anyway following a system partition format, you might as well leave programs on the same partition as XP. So, if your current setup is working, I would leave it as is.

On my computer, I have a 300GB external drive which holds all the things I want to keep (installers, music, video, document backups, savegames, etc), and I have a 200GB internal to which I install *everything* (games, utility programs, misc apps, etc). My 100GB internal is currently empty, I will likely use it for emergency backup/overflow space.

Hope this helps.

I usually allocate about 5-6 billion bytes for Windows 2000, maybe just a bit more for XP. Then I put the rest of the space into a large D: drive that holds everything else. You just have to make sure to install all your tools and programs in to D:\Tools for example. Try to find programs without any registry dependencies, so you can just use them in their directories when you reinstall.