Setting up my Mac with bootcamp

[DELTAsnake]

My first ever Mac should arrive Tuesday and first thing I will need to do is setup bootcamp.

What I am thinking of doing is dividing up the hard drive into a 250gb OSX drive, a 250gb Vista/7 drive, a 50gb XP drive and the rest as a shared user data drive formatted as NTFS so all OS's can use it (I will use Macfuse for OSX NTFS support).

How should I go about setting all this up? Any utilities I should use to set this up?

[twoodcc]

this is an iMac, right?

the first thing to do is partition the drive with bootcamp utility

[DELTAsnake]

OK I've done more research. Do I use the boot camp software to allocate 250gb to OSX, the rest to Windows, then use the Windows 7 installer to divide the drive further?

[GFSarah]

I believe you'll need to figure up your numbers beforehand if you want to leave an even 250 for OSX. If I remember correctly, when you create a new partition, you set how big you want THAT partition to be -- not how big you want what's already there to be and then leave x amount of space for other OS's and so on. Was that clear? It's a bit hard to explain ... But what it amounts to is my first sentence: I think you'll need to figure it all out before you start so you'll know how big to create each new partition in order to leave exactly 250 for the OSX.

[DELTAsnake]

Well a word of warning to anyone wanting to setup there mac like this. Don't let windows do any partioning. It will take over your hfs partition leaving you without osx.