Partitioning

I'm sure I read somewhere that you could protect your system from malware quite well by partitioning it. Does this make sense to anyone?

I have never partitioned a hard drive before. Is it worth it?

 

Welcome to Wilder's Scoobs.

Partitioning alone will not protect your computer from malware.
While making a separate Linux partition and having multi-operating system boot can help to isolate one from the other, it does not protect you.
Malware can actively look at and infect/delete these other partitions just as you can look at them in the My Computer window. (In the case of a Linux partition, it could just reformat the whole drive.)

What partitioning does is help you logically organize and separate.
Less virulent malware may infect/delete only your operating system drive/partition. By having your data separate, in this sense it would protect it. More advanced malware could actively infect/delete all drives/partitions.
If you need to reformat the OS partition due to a malware infection, at least your data will not be erased.

Is it worth it to partition the drive? Yes.
Is it better to have more hard drives rather than partitioning one big drive? Yes, hard drives will fail, multiple drives help mitigate the risk somewhat.
If you have only one hard drive? Yes. Partition it like this OS/Programs/Data
If you have 2 drives? Yes. OS/Programs on one drive, Data on the other.
With 3 drives, you probably wouldn't need to partition, OS on one, Programs on the other, and Data on the third.

It also depends on if you a starting clean installing OS etc. or you already have lots of programs installed and have everything just the way you want it.
In the latter case and you have only one drive, you could make a just a Data partition and move your Favorites, email, and other important data there.

Partition Magic works very well, make sure to back up your hard drive first!
I've heard that BootIt ng also works well, but is probably for more advanced users (I haven't tried it myself, because PM works well for me still).

You can also take it up a notch with RAID 1 mirroring, but that is another topic.