soon to be a first time SD user - partition question

[southside]

Hi,
I have a Powerbook G4 1.25 GHz and running Panther... I have made small backups of various data over the past 3 years or so of owning the notebook. I am getting a LaCie D2 Quadra 500 gb external drive in the mail shortly (hopefully very soon). I plan to use SD on it to create an image backup of the drive. After that I plan to try to update to either TIGER or LEOPARD. I have read horror stories of the LEOPARD upgrade and also understand that the current version of SD is not LEOPARD compatible. What are recommendations of partitioning the new LaCie HD - or not to partition it? We also have an old Dell PC running XP. We put it away, haven't used it in quite awhile. There is a remote possibility that we might want to use it in the future, and if so, might want to backup the latest and greatest from it to the external drive. If we do that, I know I will need at least two partitions - one in the HFS and the other in NTFS (or FAT - for Ghosting). At any rate, would like to hear recommendations on the partioning of the drive. If anybody has LEOPARD running on a Powerbook G4 1.25 GHz notebook (with 1.5 Gigs RAM), would also like to hear if it is best to just stick with what works - PANTHER, rather than upgrade to TIGER or LEOPARD...

thanks in advance!,
southside