Maximum Partition Size For Windows 7 64-bit?

I found out that the partition size exceeded the roughly 200Gig (approximately or less - from running Vista on two machines). I was not sure if the maximum partition size was dependent upon the operating system or the motherboard chip-set.I ended up crashing my original ATA 133 500 gig drive on the C: partition. The drive was an ATA drive and my plan is to install a Blu-Ray / DVD RW drive. Currently I have a DVD Read Write installed and it wouldn't hurt to keep both of the optical drives on the motherboard's ATA pins.This will delegate the 500 gig Maxtor drive to a USB backup or possibly for my PS3. This leaves the 1TB drive and a couple of questions.1) I intend to partition the 1TB drive in into 2 partitions. This is to prevent the loss of the entire partition (as what happened to the ATA drive) and protecting the second partition for downloads and backups. For a reasonable price I can add another (up to 8) SATA drive[s] and rather than use them to automatically copy the other SATA, I will add additional storage.(2) The mainboard was made for compatibility with Vista (another question). Am I correct in assuming that the MSI CoreCell(tm) nForce 570 Chipset board with an AM2 AMD Athlon(tm) 64/FX/X2 Processors and 2 Gig or ram will not operate properly (true multitasking) with Windows 7 Home Premium (64 bit) operating system. Am I better off waiting for a true i5 board?