New Windows Install, big Hard drive, any suggestions?? partition etc?

Hi.. I have been running WinXP on my DAW for a long time and I don't want to go to Windows 7 because I like the Aardvark Q10 so much. Also I haven't really had any problems or limitations running this system.
  However i have accumulated a lot of plugins and samples and probably too many useless programs.  I had a bug in my registry somewhere that wouldn't allow me to get my Fruity Loops studio running for a long time, but I seem to have weeded that bug out with Advanced System Care 5 which I would really recommend if you've been on the internet much.
   I also had a bug of some kind that forced me to hit ESC everytime I booted up for the last few months in order to get out of the blue welcome screen to my desktop.
  Now that I like my configuration I get the Blue Screen of Death everytime I try to clone the drive, so I think there's something else in there. After about 4 years of running all these miscellaneous programs and going on the internet and everything, I think I must have a registry full of junk even since I've scanned and cleaned it.  M 1 TB hard drive is about 50% full.
  Now i have several 1.5 TB hard drives and I'm thinking of doing a clean install of Windows and then all the program installations ... lot of work I wanted to avoid.... 
   So I don't want to get too complicated, but I can partition the drive. I don't want to do RAID I don't think.
   Should I partition the drive and put the OS on there and then use the rest of the hard drive for programs and samples?  Is there any advantage to that?  I'm just thinking if I get in trouble and have to re-install windows. Would it be possible to reformat that partition and re-install the OS without touching the programs and samples. Or do they have to be on the same drive. I also plan to clone the thing when I get it all installed and running the way I want. 

 Ok thanks for any input.  I have a windows 7 computer that is really not too bad too, I might eventually start using it for a DaW. Right now I'm using it for video. 



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI3_ykb-HtQ

Should I partition the drive and put the OS on there and then use the rest of the hard drive for programs and samples? Is there any advantage to that?

 
The advantage is that you can make an image of the OS partition that is much smaller than an image of the entire drive. In most cases, you can separate the programs from the OS partition so long as you keep the partition naming ("drive" letter) the same, and a restored image of the OS will be able to find them again. It is possible that you might have to re-authorize them. I usually keep OS and installed programs on one disk or partition and data including samples someplace else. Restoring an image of the OS and programs almost always will restore the system to the working state of the image. If you had made an image of your system before your glitches appeared, you could get back to the working state in minutes instead of hours.
 
There is a potential slight performance penalty to keeping stuff on two partitions on the same drive as it may force a longer head travel to jump between the two partitions. Multiple drives provide better performance.

I always partition my harddrive. Less time to defrag the logical drive (partition) and only thing on my C: partition is the OS and whatever else gets put there by programs that now put stuff there. The only thing I got on my C: drive is Tutorials and Sample Content from Sonar or an older version of MC. I make the partition the size I want and Sonar is completely on that partition plus anything else like the music or whatever - in my case some youtube movies I made that are not all that good. If I back up the C: drive and have to restore the OS then that is all I have to do is have a recent backup and everything will work like it did before. I have the old harddisk also as a slave drive so I am all the way up to letter P: as a logical drive, well most of the time I don't even look at some partitions anymore since programming was on those, and patches and games on another. I would not have it any other way.

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/geom/tracks-c.html The tracks are numbered, starting from zero, starting at the outside of the platter and increasing as you go in.