how many partitions?
 

I'm not understanding how many partitions to do.I'm willing to format a partition( d drive ) first.Should I click the add or new button in disk druid ? automatic installation asks me to format the whole hard drive and set linux in a primary drive ( c drive ) which is not possible.
how can I fix the mount point.For example ,if I click on my unformatted d drive in " new".Then a box comes up asking me to input the desired size and "mount point."That's where I'm stuck.Should I manually write " /swap " and fix the size to 512mb ( my ddr ram is 512 mb)? do I need to " add " a new partition for "boot"? or /boot ?
what should be the mount point for the root partition which is going to be growable ? /root ? or just "/" or "/,"
does that mean whenever I wish to access something in root partition i'll need to do like /root/filename ? how big should the /boot partition be ,that is,if it's necessary.

To save yourself trouble just create a "/" and a swap(you choose it in partition type). That's all you need.

How can I modify or resize the size of my root partition ? should the root partition be in ext3/ext2 or vfat format? my primary c drive wid winxp is in vfat and so does my d drive.I tried to "edt" from disk druid and create a partition and saw that all the space on my d drive was selected for boot.should I create the root or swap partition first ? should both partitions match the file system types ? I have a 14.something gig d drive with 6 gig free space.I'm wiling to get linux installed and not fearing about anything getting formatted only from d drive.Should click on delete partition first,then make new partitions or should I edit the existing partition with 6gig of free space ?

Your D drive...
Is it a physically separate hard drive to your C drive, or just a separate partition?
Does it actually have anything on it? You refer to it as having 6 gig free space, but also to it being unformatted.
If there is anything on it, would you like to keep it?

The answers to those should help someone point you in the right direction.

u need to delete ur d drive first. then edit to make one root (symbol /) and one swap.

your root partition would be ext3 or ext2. i recommend ext3. your swap partition will be swap. you dont have to specify a file system for thta.

Remember that your swap partition should be twice the size of your ram. that is, if your ram is 128 mb, make your swap 256 mb.

Depending the size of your harddrive for each individual zise, you should have a partition for:

/
/boot
/usr
/home
/var
A swap partition

It's good to have them all for security, and for upgrading to new distros. You'll only have to format the /usr and / partitions.

Most of your programs will go in /usr, and all user things will go in /home. ( I give them an equal amt. on my 80Gb HDD)
Swap should be the same zise as your RAM as a rule of thumb.
/var can get a Gb if you can spare it (I generally give it 2). Apache files go in there, logs (which are important)

I'd give around 300Mb for boot (more if you want to have a lot of kernels)
A good.. 2Gb for / just in case (you can do with aroun 600Mb, or maybe less, changes depending on the distro, want you want to do and so on)

"Your D drive...
Is it a physically separate hard drive to your C drive, or just a separate partition?
Does it actually have anything on it? You refer to it as having 6 gig free space, but also to it being unformatted.
If there is anything on it, would you like to keep it?

The answers to those should help someone point you in the right direction."

my d drive is just a separete partition,
it is 14.4 gig in size and it has 6.3 gig free.at a minimum,how many and which partitions should I create?

Well, if you're not worried about losing the contents of D, and you want the quickest way of getting things up and running...

Delete D, then create 2 partitions in its place, double your ram for swap and the rest for / (as an ext3 partition). Partitioning is very much horses for courses, whilst teval is technically correct in espousing 6 partitions (although, 300 meg for /boot does seem excessive), that's way beyond the requirements of your average new user.

You should be able to resize D from Windows and then apply the same system to the free space, but, as I've not used Windows for a year, I'll let someone else explain that.