I would recommend using about 20-30GB's for the OS and just create a partition on your hard drive and keep all your games and stuff on that partition. That way if it breaks (It /is/ Vista) you still save all your precious game files.

You can also run Steam from another OS and play the games from the other partition without having to re-install. I did this with XP and Windows 7 Beta as well.
Source(s):
Computer Nerd.

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You know, partitioning was nice when we were stuck with FAT32 - which wasn't robust, was inefficient with small files (and generally inefficient), and when we were also stuck with Windows98 which we'd need to clean-install every year or so.

These days, unless you don't mind playing round with non-destructively resizing partitions every once in a while (I love partition-magic), partitions are really just a pain in the butt. I would seriously recommend against them.

I mean, by the time you want to re-install the OS, wouldn't you rather just buy a larger hard-drive, install windows fresh, and copy the data you still want from the old drive? (even Steam will migrate gracefully.) Or use an imaging tool to copy the whole OS + data to the new drive and expand the partition to fill it. (no OS re-install needed.)

We accumulate such a massive volume of data these days IMHO the best way to do a milestone backup every once in a while is when you do an OS re-install, and you can just keep the old HDD with the data it contains. (Maybe put it in an enclosure if you want to make it an active backup destination.) It beats shuffling things between partitions, trying to be careful with non-standard install locations and tight disk-space. Much better to have oodles of space, no restrictions on how you order your data, and just to a massive drive upgrade when the free space gets low enough you start to notice it.

Well, that's how I like to do it. If you're gonna have separate spaces, why not put two physical drives in there and get the speed benefit of swap files on a separate platter?
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