Whether you're doing a fresh installation of Windows 7 or formating your hard drive to reinstall Windows XP from scratch, a separate data partition comes in handy.

Cedric Crawley wants to keep Windows 7 and his applications in one partition, and his data in another. Creating a separate data partition protects both your system and your data.

Windows allows you to create multiple FAT32 and NTFS partitions on a USB or External drive using Diskpart, Disk Management, MakeWinPEMedia.

Leo knows that data is safer if you don't keep it on the same partition as Windows and your programs. I tell him how to move it in Windows XP.