That's what I did (with partitions since I had one disc only) in my old Win98 machine. However my current XP one isn't partitioned since the HD is single partitioned as I bought it, because my current strategy for beating Windows death is not killing Windows myself--so far so good, two years and just like new at top performance.
By the way when partitioning, be sure to do it in a way supported by the OS you'll install, preferably with the tools provided by the OS's own installer, or even it won't hurt to take the time to check for HD errors once after the partition. I suffered a couple of instances of very bad and faulty performance between reformat-partitions with Win98, and they weren't due to the fact that Win98 sucked, alone. HD errors needn't be hardware-based. Sometimes you'd partition your HD with one of those Linux-based beta freebies (or with famous PartitionMagic like I did), then install Windows uneventfully, and everything seems fine. But crashes etcetera happen from time to time, and if you care to check for HD errors you find some. Then you reformat-partition properly, and the same disc now has no errors.