I want to add Linux Mint (Mate) as a 2nd OS in a dual boot situation. Since I may start using Virtual Box within Mint, I want to dedicate as much hard disc space to it as I can.

I have plenty of space on my disc, but my other OS has a big chunk of ("unmovable") data in the middle of the disc.

My question is, is the partition manager on the install DVD smart enough to move this up closer to its OS, so that I will have a larger contiguous space after it for my Linux?

Based on my experience with partition managers, I wouldn't trust it to move the data belonging to that other OS. Even though the partition manager might say that it can, once you have it move that data, the other OS could end up not even being able to function, especially if it is windows. Incidentally, what is your other OS?

My experience has been that Windoze (for example) often won't reduce past the "half-way" point of the disk.
Contrary to @xode, I have found the gparted liveCD excellent for shrinking NTFS further than Win will allow.

YMMV - and note my sig.

Win10

But it is a fresh reload (no backups reinstalled yet,) & not much else on it except the OS. If worse comes to worse, I could always reload it after Mint is installed.

You might want to consider turning the entire hard drive over to mint and put your win10 in a virtual machine under mint. If virtual box lets you, you could use that for a win10 virtual machine under mint. Otherwise, you could try VMWare player, which doesn't cost anything (last time I checked). From what I have seen, the latest version of VMWare player will allow you to create virtual machines. Personally, I have found virtual machines in place of dual booting to be a lot cleaner and a lot more capable.

And if you tell the gparted liveCD to shrink the windows NTFS partition further than windows will allow, what does windows do when you again go to boot it after having used gparted?

Yes. I have thought of that. A huge advantage (for me) is that the M$ DVD offered the choice of installing v8.1, or v10. Once I chose v10, the v8.1 option vanished. Installing M$ in a fresh VM would probably revive that v8.1 option.

As with each M$ upgrade, they seem to remove (or hide) some portion of functionality. I even still have a W7-Pro still unopened in the box. I may just go with that.

I'll have to look at VM Ware again. Last time I checked them out, it seems the host had to be a dedicated server. Would it work under Mint?

Thanks for the replies. This site is awesome.

Generally starts fine.
I have had it force chkdsk as well - once ran for over 45 minutes, but finished successfully. That was on a laptop with a particularly slow disk - which I'm typing this on.

Likely yes. Please let me know if that doesn't happen because that would suggest that either the DVD or the DVD drive was altered.

I will never let any Microsoft software have uncontrolled access to any of my computers. All of Microsoft's software, including windows, will always be in a sandbox and putting windows in a virtual machine does just that. Microsoft has shown time and again that they are way more concerned about themselves than their customers, even to the point where their customers get harmed by their actions. Further, when it comes to operating system stability and ability to control and use your computer, linux far and away beats windows in just about any way that you can imagine.

I have been using VMWare Workstation for years and Win4Lin 9X for years before that. The windows that I use has been a virtual machine for more than 10 years. VMWare Workstation is designed to install and run on any linux desktop system and VMWare Player is a "lite" version of VMWare Workstation. I see no reason why it wouldn't work under mint. VMWare Workstation will even support linux distributions that are not listed in its documentation as being supported. For example, the VMWare Workstation 10 that I have says that it supports only up to SUSE 13.1 but I had no problem getting it to run on the SUSE 13.2 I have. However, to allow that extended support, you will need to make sure that you have installed all gcc and c++ compilers, all glibc-devel libraries, all kernel-devel libraries, and anything else you believe VMWare might need in order to compile kernel modules specific to your system because that is what it will do if you have a linux distribution that is not listed as supported in its documentation.

[SOLVED]
Thanks for all of your input.
I will probably run Mint 'Live' until I get up to speed, and then install it as the OS, with M$ running in a VM. This will give me my entire HD in one piece, and I can then devote as much as I need for the VM program(s).

As often as M$ needs to be revived, it would probably be much faster/easier to just recall a stable 'Snapshot' when needed.

(My last encounter with reloading M$ was because whatever I caught had gone into my 'Restore Points' and deleted a file. Restore could not do anything.)