Essentially if you hook the new drive up to a PC, you don't really have to create partitions you can just allocate proper space.
What I mean by that, is Disk Management will see the whole volume at first. When you go to initialize the drive, only give it a piece of the total space, essentially creating a paritition within Windows. Then, use the leftover space to create the second (or subsequent for as many as needed) partitions.
Once that is done, you don't really have to create the image unless you want it for backup. You can go right from one partition to another, which is the quickest way to go. If the drive isn't healthy, I suggest doing it that way. Then, when the new drive is ready to go, make a backup of that. You want to minimize the amount of time the "sick drive" is needed. Imaging to another disk is much faster than creating an image of a disk.