Read the section on creating partitions in Linux Installation and Getting Started. If you have 8 Mb or less you must create and use a swap partition. For decent basic performance, you should have at least 24 Mb of combined RAM and swap space.
You will be given a choice of two partitioning programs cfdisk and fdisk. The cfdisk program is a full screen program and can be somewhat easier for the novice (or expert) to use.
You will then be presented with a list of drives found on your system. Select a drive to partition. After partitioning that drive you will be offered that chance to partition another drive.
After exiting the partitioning program, if you see a message like ``Re-read table failed with error ...'' you will need to reboot your machine so that Linux can reload the partition data. This generally happens if you changed the partition structure related to extended partitions. If you need to reboot, do so, and go through all the same steps you did to get to the partitioning step, but then skip the partitioning step (you've already done it).