There's one big misconception about installing 4 OS's on 4 partitions .... somehow peeps thing that is one OS dies, the others are still working. Problem is, if installed as most do, part of every one of those OS's resides on your C partition (boot.ini) and without that nothing is booting.
"Back in the day", the folks at PowerQuest had a little utility that came with "Partition Magic" which actually did truly isolate one partition form another. Symantec bought PQ and this product sits in the doldrums. What PM allowed you to do was create a teeny little DOS partition (or FAT32) which contained your boot menu. After a menu selection, PM actually hid all the other OS partitions and unhid the one you selected in the menu. I did a lot of builds this way "back in the day" with Win98 on Partition C(1) for the kiddies and NT4 on C(2) for moma and dada to do work. When the machine was booted, it would default to Win98 unless one selected NT4 on a menu and I'd set it to about 5 seconds to make the choice. So if kids turned on machine, they'd go into win98 and play games.....they couldn't get to the NT4 partition if they tried because it was "invisible" and not accessible (not to mention it was NTFS).
Problem is Vista doesn't like PM. Once you do any formatting with Vista, PM ain't gonna work so you'd have to use one of their competitors. Now if you create all the partitions with PM and then install Vista, I'm told by peeps that have done it that it works fine....unless you let Vista format anything on that drive.
In the OP's case, if I was doing what you are doing, I'd use one of these options:
1. Hyper OS
http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/
2. Something equivalent to this
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTk3
As for partition sizes.....in the situation above I always had all OS's share the same page file. It's a simple enough procedure well described on numerous web sites. This let me have up to 3 OS's if one of them was on a FAT32 partition and 2 OS's if I was doing NTFS and needed that 50 MB DOS boot partition. That was because of the 4 primary partitions limit on a HD.
-OS1 (FAT32) / OS2 (anything) / OS3 (Anything) / Extended Partition with various logical partitions
-Mini Boot Menu Partition / OS1 (NTFS) / OS 2 (NTFS) / Extended Partition with various logical partitions
I have XP partitions of 4 GB, 8 GB and 16 GB on various boxes here.... the smaller you make it, the more you need to move stuff off to other partitions. I do OS's on C*, D gets swap and temp files, E usually gets programs, F games and G Data.
-Every program install must be "custom" so you can make it go somewhere besides C:\ProgramsFiles.
-Swap and temp files need their own home
-You need to make e-mail go somewhere else
-Nothing goes in C:\MyDocuments
As for the placement being a non issue, just think about it. The two most accessed file groups on your puter are your swap files and your temp files. Your HD can move about 118 MB'sec at the outer edge, and about 69 at the inner edge. Simple question.....you want it moving that data closer to 118 or 69 MB/sec ?
Lock your temp and swap files in on a D partition right behind a small C partition and you gonna be very close to 118....forever. With just one big C drive, on day 1 you will see no difference between performance between default windows install and with a separate swap / temp file partition. Just don't try to compare them on Day 365. On day 365, with 500 GB of space filled on your HD, you new temp files and swap file is gonna be thrust out in 75 MB/sec territory while if you had it on it's own locked in partition at the front of the drive, it's still performing at day 1 speeds of 116 MB/sec.
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