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Yes, you can use cfdisk to modify your partitions. If you want to retain your existing partitions, then obviously you should leave them alone, but if you want to reorganize them, the easiest thing to do is just delete them all then recreate them. (NOTE: doing that will delete all existing data on the disk.) In terms of the number of partitions, and their relative sizes, that's a matter of personal preference. The bare minimum for installing Linux is just a swap partition and the / partition, but if you prefer, you can allocate separate partitions for /boot, /home, /usr, /tmp, /var, /root, and so forth.
Sizing is again a matter of preference; obviously if you just go with a swap and / partition, all you really need to do is decide how big swap should be and give the rest of the disk to /. As for swap, the old rule of thumb was to make it twice the size of RAM, but these days, that's obsolete -- if you've got say 512Mg RAM and you set up a 1G swap, all you'd be doing is wasting disk space since swap is hardly ever used once you get beyond 256Mg RAM (at least in my experience, other may disagree). (I've got 512Mg RAM and a 256Mg swap space and the max usage I've ever seen for swap is about 30% or so, tops.)
Personally, based on the comments in your post, I'd use cfdisk to blow everything away and start fresh, then define a swap partition of 256Mg max, define a 100Mg partition for /boot (so that it can be mounted read-only, which is a useful security benefit) and then give everything else to /. There are any number of threads here at LQ discussing partitioning schemes, and I'd suggest checking those out for other points of view. Good luck -- J.W.
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