Stupid newbie = reinstall

[CAVT]

Hi there... well, I'm going to look damn stupid, but I have no other choce than reinstalling my system, lol. It happens that probably the installation of Wine, Ntfs-3g or GIMP screwed up my access to the PCC, it will simply not appear, the splash screen would flash but only the text, no image at all, not even in root mode. The Synaptic icons are gone too. Unfortuantely I wasn't enough wise to detect the prpblem in time, and then I took precipitated measures, like removing Drakconf... please, don't laugh (ok, you may, but only a bit).
Naturally, when I tried to reinstall it Synaptic told me that a lot of packages should be removed and a lot others need to be upgraded/reinstalled/whatever. That should not be a problem, but I'm using a special distro of PCLOS2007 which has certain softwares made to work only in that version; actually the makers of the distro disencourage to make any upgrade. Therefore I must reinstall. Fortunately I installed PCLOS less than a week ago, so there are no problems as no valuable data will be lost. I will need only to customize the desktop and some stuff again but I don't mind.

Well, that was the introduction... Now, which steps should I follow to reinstall PCLOS? I have the LiveCD, and in my HD I have other three partitions with WIndows XP which I want to keep as they are. When I installed PCLOS I set in the unalocated space (previously created with Partition Magic) one swap partition of 1.5 or 2GB and the rest of the disk (around 140GB) to the root mount point. Do I have to format those parts or try to leave them again as unalocated space?.
And now that I will reinstall everything again, I would like to make three partitions for Linux in those 140GB of disk: one would be the obligatory swap, the other the obligatory root mount point and the last one only for data and miscelaneous uses... how should I specify the type of mount point for this extra partition and with which type of format (ntfs, fat, etc.)?

Thanks in advance, and my apologies if this is stupid, but I have never been in these needs and I don't know the right procedure.

CAVT

[Old-Polack]

CAVT:

Just a thought. How about swap, /, and /home, with swap sized as before, / at about 15-20 GB, and the rest /home. Last, install the 2010 beta to those partitions. With the next beta, you could reinstall the OS without touching /home with all your personal settings and data. When the 2010 final arrives, again install the OS itself, reusing /home. That way you will already be doing something to get started on the right track for the future. If you install any of the 2009 systems, you'll need to reinstall in a few weeks anyway, and may not be able to save your /home/<you> settings, as there are many much changed applications in the 2010 repository.

[silverbirch]

I'm just curious as to why you are using Pclos 2007?