Wallstreet disk format & system reinstall

I've spent a bit of money and time on RAM and HD to be able to upgrade this Wallstreet to OS X.

I think I read some advice wrong, and when I first installed the upgrade 12 GB HD I mistakenly formatted the drive into two partitions - the smaller one being the one for the system software. When trying to install OS X (10.2) the dialog told me that I couldn't install the software on either partition, as the first partition had to be the larger one.

What I'd like to do is start over and reinitialize the drive. Should I have two partitions - the first one larger (say 8 GB) or should I just have one partition for both OS 9 and OS X? I believe I need to have 9 on there first anyway in order to install OS X.

But a further problem is that I can't seem to do an erase and reformat/initialize of the HD, as I get the message that I can't erase my start up disk. I have tried installing the OS 9 CD with the C key held down, but this is where I run into this problem. Disk Utility won't let me reinitalize. Again, what I really need is the start up partition to be larger to accomodate OS X.

Thanks for answers,

k

Wallstreet 233 Mhz processor model with 512 MB RAM (two 256MB Modules) and 12 GB Travelstar HD.

OS 9.0

CD Drive