[JCBigler]

As per Drive 1, keep in mind that you can only have four primary partitions on any single hard drive. If you need more partitions, then you have to take one of those four primary partitions and create an extended partition. Within this extended partition you can have as many logical partitions as you need.

Personally, I like to keep all of my partitions as primary partitons. I'm not sure how Protools handles extended and logical partitions. My suggestion would be to keep the Protools audio drive as a primary partition.

The only other thing you might run into problems with, it the size of your XP-Games partition. If you have a lot of game, and they are newer ones, then you may run out of space.

Also, you don't need a seperate partition for Protools and plug-ins. You will install the Protools software and all plug-ins on your main XP-Protools partition. Certianly 15 gig should be enough for that.

Also keep in mind when you format a hard drive, the amount of usuable space on the physical drive goes down considerably because of the overhead involved in the operating system addressing the physical storage. The easy formula is to take the hard drive size that the manufacturer states, and multiply it by .931 (this will get you pretty close). So, for a 250GB hard drive, 250 * .931 = ~ 232.75GB of usable space.

Here's the way I would partition it (assuming 250Gb drives):

Disk 0
1--Windows XP w/Protools (C:) = 80GB
2--Windows XP w/games (D:) = 152.75GB

Disk 1
1--Protools Audio (E:) = 32GB
2--Data Storage and Backup (F:) -- 200.75GB

32 GB for Protools should be plenty, especially if you practice good back up etiquite and burn your sessions to CD or DVD once you get to a good point.