Re-installing XP

Hey peeps, i hope you knowledgeable folk could help me out with a little issue. I wanted to reinstall xp & have never installed an os before, so i thought before i format my drive i would set up a seperate partition (using partition magic) and try installing ther to see if all goes well, yet still be able to go back to my original os if it doesn't.
Well it went amazingly well, and i didnt need anything other than the xp installer disc.
I was done all done in under an hour, including all updates and installing kaspersky & firefox.

So i guess my question is, will it be exactly the same when i format the whole drive, as it was installing to a seperate partition? or was it getting drivers and whatnot from the version of xp already installed in the other partition?

Thanx in advance

~Q~

 

Will be exactly the same.
Something you may want to consider though which I recommend is creating at least 2 partitions. One for your OS and program installations and one for your data.
This is generally overlooked by everyone but IT and power users. Alot of PC's are starting to ship with separate data partitions though which is good.

Anyway this generally just makes things easier as -
1) you don't need to migrate your data back onto the drive next time you reinstall. You just leave the data partition alone (make sure you still have backups though).
2) Makes backups easier as you just backup the data partition.