The boot partition is always on the C: drive, so if you partition your drive first, then take an image using ghost of the C: drive, save it on the new partition as an image, and then check the image in dos on bootup with the ghost boot cd, to make sure you can see the image on your new partition from dos via the Ghost boot cd BEFORE you format anything.

To partition your drives use Partition Magic, makes it easy as pie to split a drive into upto three seperate partitions, it has step by step instruction wizards so you can't really mess anything up, and it stores all actions so you can check em before you execute.

If you need anymore advice, give me a shout and I'll try to help as best I can.