I'm a bit confused as to which partition manager or method (preferably free) to use. So far, everything I've found seems to run in Linux, but since I'm currently running windows, this will not work for me. Suggestions?

Hello,
Get yourself one of the LIVE CDs...Knoppix or Ubuntu as an example, to boot your computer. I used QTparted,
to change my hard drive partitions. It comes on most of the LIVE CDs. It has an easy to understand graphical interface. It works as well as the commercial windows partitioner Powerquest PQ magic.

The ubuntu installer will do this for you. Just make sure to defrag your windows partition and backup your important data first.

If I were you, I'd download GParted iso and burn that to CD. It's a really user-friendly, clear, reliable thingie that can make, delete, resize and move partitions in many formats, including Ext2/3, XFS, Reiser, Fat and NTFS.

It is what I used when I installed my first Linux and XP was still covering all of the disk; resized from 250GB to 50GB without a problem. Have been using it ever since and never lost the slightest bit of data.

As for QtParted, I'm none to fond of that one. Not that it ruined anything, but I remember quite a few occasions where it refused to work or simply exited with an error. Besides, why download a full liveCD to get QtParted when you can get Gparted separately (about 30MB). And you can/will use it time and again.

Agree with jay73 completely. It's even recommended by the linux-ntfs project (or was last I looked).
Don't worry about defragging, or disabling swap (under Windoze) - it handles it all.

Used it plenty without problems. However, if it tells you it can't do the job, believe it. Go do the chkdsk, and try again.

You can get and use for free, bootitng, it does everything you heard here and it is a boot manager if you want, and it creates compressed images of any partition or volume for back up and restore. A operating system partition with 6GB used space has a compressed image 1.5GB in size that can be stored in a data partition shared by all your OS's, or in a USB external drive, or burned to several CD's or a DVD, pen drive. It also wipes and/or secure wipes a drive or partition, which is what I do before restoring an image (clean up residual files from previous installation). It takes less than ten minutes on my machine to wipe a 10GB partition, make new partition, restore the image of your choice that was created in same size partition anywhere on the drive.
These features need you to create the partitions or resize them with bootitng as it aligns partitions within C.H.S. values. It can also slide a partition.
Very nice.
If you want to use the boot manager features you need to install it, you get 30 days trial after install and can pay $35 US or un-install it, can create over 200 primary partitions on one drive if you like after installed. Documentations come with it. I don't think it's above 2mb sized download.

EDIT: I don't worry about screwing up an OS, takes less than ten minutes to get a fast fresh stable system back.

Thanks for the advice! I'm going to try GParted. The live CD won't work for me because I'm going to try and take the plunge into Gentoo. Thanks again!

And take that advice from natewlew. You might have to run the windows defrag program several times to get it all compacted enough so you can resize and give Linux enough space. Also remember to uninstall any unused windows software before defragging.

If you were here, we would look at installing VMserver if your hardware could handle it. It's much easier than re-partitioning & setting up a dual-boot system.

In the last 4 years I have done or overseen at least 100 dual-boot installs for new users. Since last summer when VMserver became no cost, I always look at it as the ideal choice. If there isn't enough RAM, the usual barrier, then dual-boot is the fall-back option.