Under you current plan you are tempting
the fates to spare you from disaster. Regardless of how many partitions
you create you still will have just one drive in your system, and if anything
goes wrong with it, you will lose all of it.
If you purchased a desktop or tower system, rather than a laptop, I
suggest that you buy at least one more hard drive (100 -140GB), and make that
the C:\ drive in order to truly isolate your operating system and other
windows based applications.
Then if your C:\ drive
fails, or becomes too infected to repair / recover by other
means, you will be able to reformat the C:\ drive, or replace it with a
new drive and re-install your operating system and applications, without
losing all of your DOS based applications, and more importantly the data you
are going to create or migrate over to the new PC. You should have room for 2-3 hard
drives, plus the optical drive, at a minimum on a tower or desktop PC. NOTE: A 3.5" hard drive will fit in
the floppy drive slot, if you no longer use floppy discs. You might also be able to use external
drives for the other dedicated functions you envision. Each time you partition a hard drive you
minimize the overall storage capacity on the drive, because the available
sectors may be in different partitions.
BTW some of the 64-Bit PC systems,
have a virtual 32 bit operating system that runs concurrently with the 64
Bit system , for use with programs not compatible with the 64 Bit
environment.
If you bought a laptop, you will need
external drives to realize the benefits of a multiple drive system, without
rethe rest of the sorting to partitioning.