I don't think I missed out much as I did stated
My advice was to answer the thread which is on booting issues mainly. How to partition one's disk is outside the thread's scope and there are many answers to different combinations.

The OP has indicated in Post #1 that 100Gb space is available but did not say where from. I could only assume he knows to arrange the 100Gb to be made available.

Thank you for your response. I realised after posting that there were a lot of thing I don't understand. No I don't know how to arrange the 100 Gb.

My goal is to multiboot. The steps I think I need to get there are:
1. beable to back up have safe copy of my home directory, then if it all goes pear shaped. I can reinstall and restore my home directory.

2. Gain a greater understanding of partitioning. I know I have a 160 Gb harddrive, but I can only see 52 Gb.

3. Get a greater understanding of multibooting. Which I think means rereading a lot and asking hopefully not too stupid questions.

I feel I have wasted people's time, but I have learnt how much I don't know. I think I possibly need to be in the Linux Newbie forum as well.

OK if you do not know about partitioning that is easy to fix. Try to use the terminal program like cfdisk which can guide you through.

Your first task is, like others have suggested, to resize the big partition with a lot of empty space using Gparted or Parted Magic, both of which now offer Live CD. It is advisable to download the latest from their web sites because later versions are a lot more capable.

Once you have the unallocated space just use cfdisk program in terminal to create the new partition.

I leave you to experiment with it but offer this advice; you can try to change the partition table any way you want to see how Cfdisk responds to it but nothing is formalized until you highlight "write", press "entry" and confirm with a "yes". In other word you can literally achieve everything by try and error.

Lastly if you use terminal tools to create partitions they are not formatted. You need to formatted them with program like mke2fs or mkdosfs etc. Normally to install a Linux the installer will format the partition for you.

Everything you do in partitioning, using terminal programs are "reversible", meaning if you write down the original partition table, you can change it 100 times and then go back to the original setting. Nothing is changed until you write something on the partitions.

Formatting is irreversible! Graphic partitioning tools often mix the partition creation with formatting.