Partitions dont help thoughput, but I doubt your hard drive configuration is causing your issue.
What are your Project Settings? What is the properties of your source video? What are your export settings?
Thinking workaround;
Position the work area bar over the first 20 or 30 seconds of your timeline and export a DV.avi of the work area. Overlay this rendered movie over the beginning of your movie and export as Mpeg 2 DVD.
Right out of the box I had mp PC reboot while editing in CS4 in very simple projects. An examination of Windows event viewer shows a DCOM event caused by Itunes Helper 6-10 seconds prior to the reboots. I killed it and all seems well.
It is likely the video codec is incompatible with Premiere. The Source window works the same as media player, but not the Program window. Use GSpot to determine the codec.