Custom Partitioning using the mandrake install
 

I have a Windows XP NTFS partition and a HP Recovery Fat32 partition. I want to install Mandrake 10 by taking away some of my windows partition and deleting the recovery partition. So, if I use custom partitioning, would the contents of my Windows partition be deleted? Or, does it resize and leave everything on the windows partition?

I would use a third party program to resize your windows partition to give you space for mandrake. The Custom partitioning option in the Mandrake installer will let you do this as part of the partitioning process, but I'd prefer not to have one OS playing with another OS'es partitions.

The custom partitioning option in the installer won't mess with your partitions, it will make you do all that yourself.