If you have more than one hard drive in your computer, first identify each drive using their indicated sizes. If you've never used the hard drive before, it will display as 'unallocated space' in this window because it has no file system or partitions. If you have used the drive before (say for a previous installation of Windows, it will show a partition number for each partition on the disk. If one of your drives has never been used and you want to use it as the Vista system drive, just highlight it and click next.

If you want to erase the data from an already used hard drive to make room for Vista, or if you want to partition your new drive into two or more logical drives (C:, D:, etc.) so you can have a partition for the operating system and a partition for data, click the 'drive options (advanced)' link.

Now you have a set of tools that you can use to partition and format your drives.

Splitting a new drive into two or more partitions

If you have a new drive that you want to split into two or more partitions, highlight the drive and click the 'new' button and in the box below, enter the size (in Megabytes) that you want the portion of the disk with Windows Vista on it to be.

An example would be '100000' which would give you 100,000 MB or 100GB. PCSTATS recommends leaving at least 80GB for your Vista partition. Click 'apply' to create the new partition. This may take a little while. Now repeat the above steps to create a second partition from the remaining space. Finally, highlight the first partition again and click 'next' to continue the installation process.

Removing an old partition

If you've used your hard disk before, but don't want or need any of the data on it, highlight the drive (or each partition on the drive if there is more than one) and click 'delete' to remove it (and also any data). Once the drive is reduced to 'unallocated space', Highlight it and click next to continue the installation.