the information regarding partitioning, formating, fdisk, MBR, , multiboot, ... haven't changed in quite a while... everything you'll find about it (google) will be "up-to-date"
anyway, if you're using winXP, they took away fdisk... dig in the administration settings in the control panel, they hid a gui for managing partitions there... (and it only knows to partition in fat and ntfs)
if you're using linux, it'd be easier to find the info... just type man fdisk, man parted, etc...
what OS's are you planning to boot?
ntloader has to be "fixed" if you want it to boot linux/BSD (you would have to put grub on a fat/ntfs partition, load it, and tell it to load linux/BSD).
grub or lilo can read many partition types... i like grub better (only because i haven't used lilo for about 8 years...)