I've been asked to help a friend to partition the HD on their Latitude D400. This is "refurbished" but taken over with a 14GB (approx) C: drive and the rest of the space on a 40GB drive - 24.something GB marked "Unallocated". It seems a faily normal Dell installation as far as I can tell and runs XPPro SP1. Although I have partitioned several of my own laptops, noe were Dell (I do have Dell desktops). I am always a bit nervous of partitioning somebody elses notebook without knowng if there is likely to be a hidden partition. For the moment the XPPro disk management application doesn't seem to show anything in that unallocated space but I'm not all that well acquainted with how such a partition might - or might not appear. Can anyone please advise me if it is safe to use the XP tool to divide the unallocated portion into 2 further partitions for data and applications? I'm very new to this Forum so if I'm in the wrong place or it is a common question, I will happily accept redirection.