You can partition the hard drive, real or virtual, with Parted Magic [3].
If the reason you want to go with real hardware is that something like VirtualBox doesn't feel transparent enough to you (i.e., there's a lot of magic that happens in the background when you configure it through the GUI) I'd suggest trying out QEMU first. It requires more manual configuration (you'll have to read the man page and find the right set of command line options to make it do what you want) but the end result is that you have a better understanding of the virtual hardware your guest OS is running on. Plus, the Cirrus graphics card it emulates by default is well supported by old software.
[1] One good option is to use http://www.supergrubdisk.org/super-grub2-disk/.
Actually, is there somewhere a list of all the weirdo OSes? I'd be interested to see that.
What does your OS look like? Screen shots http://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=12087
Wiki list of projects http://wiki.osdev.org/Projects
I don't meant to only report on the ones at osdev.org, but from the osdev.org wiki you can find the other main osdev sites and find their project lists. If you approach this with the attitude of open exploration, I think you'll enjoy it more.