Attempting to dual-boot, but Windows 7 comes with FOUR primary partitions
 

So, I have an HP dv6t Quad Edition, and so I have four partitions, C:, Recovery, HP_Tools, and System. I know System is extremely important, and I wouldn't dare touch it, and C: contains all of the goodies, but Recovery and HP_Tools may not be needed anymore for me, but I'm entirely sure. HP_Tools was created after a BIOS update, and it's only used for the HP diagnostic, which consists of tools I can easily find elsewhere, but not in compilation like HP's. I'm making the recovery disks as I speak, all four, so I might not need the Recovery partition either, so it may be possible to open up to partitions, one for /boot and one for the /home... or was it /swap? I forgot which goes where, but I'll handle that after I'm actually capable of dual-booting.


Secondly, I need to be able to shrink my C:, but regardless of the 200 or so GBs of free space, it won't let me do so. After researching it stated I need ed to defrag, but also found out that there are certain files at the end of the hard drive, related to hibernation, System Restore, and some others. I just need to allocate 100GBs without corrupting my filesystem using GParted, as I was explicitly warned against using it. I do have a System Recovery disk, but not a System Install disk (Besides for the HP one, which would wipe my HDD and start fresh again... rather not do that) so I don't want to risk finding out that I HAVE to do a full wipe. I have no way of backing up my files as I lack an external HDD to, but if I had to wipe, I could recover, but it would take far too long to redownload everything on my slow internet connection (Not to mention the games and data that would be lost and have to be retrieved...) So, if anyone can help me in a way that will not damage my partition, I'd appreciate it greatly.

Lastly, I'm going to be installing Sabayon Linux just to try out something new, and this doesn't have the extremely user-friendly partitioning tool that Ubuntu uses, and so I'd like to ask if it would be a good idea to use Ubuntu to re-partition my HDD (Since it managed to do so before without screwing things up) and THEN delete the Ubuntu partition, and use the free space to install Sabayon over... or, I recall seeing an option to overwrite existing Linux installations, so could that work too?



Sorry if this is out of place, but it might end up being a newbie question, and I am quite a newb when it comes to stuff like this.

What does 'it won't let me do it' mean? Are you not able to resize from windows 7? There should be a tool in disk management to shrink a partition.

If you delete the HP-Tools partition, you should then be able to create another partition after resizing windows.
If you have a Linux CD, you could post your partition information with the: sudo fdisk -l command(Lower Case Letter L in the command) and also post the df -h output to give us more information on your setup.

Do you currently have Ubuntu installed?

When I try to shrink the volume size, it said I have 0 bytes I can shrink, although I have over 200GBs of free space. I thought that fragmentation caused some files to be placed near the end of the partition leading to problems, which is why I'm defragging it right now to see if it helps or not.

Also, I'm not 100% sure if deleting HP Tools will cause any problems or not. From what I've heard from other users who did it, and even from one HP moderator on the official forums, it will not impede the operations of my laptop, but doing so will prevent me from restoring or recovering in the event of a Hard Drive failure or something like that... it's either F.U.D or I might end up screwing something up.


Also, no, I don't have Ubuntu installed, but I did on my desktop, in which I had no problem with resizing the partition using Ubuntu, but I never tried resizing it with Windows.



Edit: Attached screenshot of what it says when I attempt to shrink partition

All you need is to delete one partition. Once you get rid of one of the four primaries, you can create an extended in it's place, which is used as a container for more partitions (inside which you can set up partitions for swap, /, /home, and anything else your heart desires).

Well, you'll have to make the decision. One of those partitions has to go. End of discussion.
Then create the extended as suggested.

Win7 won't shrink below 50% in my experience - which might suggest HP installed it on the full disk then shrunk it themselves to create space for the other partitions. You'll need to use a Linux liveCD (gparted is probably best) to allow you to shrink it further.
Be aware the next Win7 reboot will most likely go into recovery - on my 360 Gig laptop it took 45 minutes. Just go make coffee and let it run to the end.

Could you be a bit more specific... as in, the black screen where it asks for a system repair disk/installation disk? Could you use a recovery disk to repair everything, and if so, how did you do it? What was missing and did you lose userland files or programs? I really don't want to end up having an unstable or unusable OS without having a way to fix it or revert the changes. Would a system recovery disk work?

As in, when Windows boots it detects that something changed and runs its own file system check.

I've done this twice with Win 7 and OpenSUSE, both times came out fine without needing any recovery discs or the like.

Yeah sorry - bad choice of terminology. What @suicidaleggroll said.