Partitioning Problems

[charlie13]

Hopefully this is not a repeat message.
I'm continuing to have difficulties installing Fedora, but at least I have made it to the partitioning stage:
I'm currently running XP on a box with 2 hard drives, one of which has an empty VFAT partition of about 16 GB. I want to devote all of this partition to Fedora.
1. Should I repartition my drive so that there's space set aside for a 'swap' partition? Or can I create this inside the pre-existing partition using Disk Druid when I install? I read on the site that many are not impressed with the partitioning 'skills' of Druid.
2. How big should my swap directory be? I have a 1.6 GHz processor and 640 MB of RAM, and I do intend to perform lengthy molecular dynamics calculations and display the results in 3D. Is there a general rule of thumb for this?
3. Do I need to devote another partition to a /boot partition? The installation guide says yes, so it's probably a good idea. I imagine that I would do so in the same way that I create the swap partition (in question 1, above), but I don't know how large it should be.
4. I should make the / partition ext3, LVM, right? And I'll still be able to read my pre-existing VFAT partitions (but not NTFS ones), right? Is there any reason to use ext2? And, I've forgotten whether or not the boot partition is of type 'boot' or type 'ext3'.

I'm wary of using the automatic partitioning options just because I don't understand them fully and don't want to lose my data -- I have way too much to back up easily.
Thank you.

[daneel971]

I suggest you to create the partition you need/want before the installation then tell anaconda to use the partition you created selecting "manual partitioning" and editing the mounpoints.
Swap is needed: I usually use a logical partition for it; the generic rule is that its size should double your ram.
You can have only the root partition with home and boot on it, if you want: you need a separate boot partition if you intens to use LVM, but the approach i suggested above doesn't need it.
Ext3 is the journalized version of ext2, and it's better and safer.
Your other fat32/ntfs are not affected - you can still see and use them; with the appropriate module, you can even write to NTFS.
Backup always your data before editing partitions.

Be sure to have clearly understood how to set up a dual boot system.