I haven't taken delivery of the laptop yet, but thought I'd prepare myself more for what I want to do. The HP laptop has a 500GB drive with Windows 7 installed. I would like to shrink the Win7 partition to 250GB; then create a 200GB for backup etc., and the rest for Linux. I will back up everything first so it shouldn't be a biggy if it doesn't work. The reason for my post is that I haven't been successful in the past in shrinking partitions; so am wondering if anyone here has done something close to what I hope to do with similar hardware.

You should be able to do this easily with Parted Magic. It's a bootable CD you can use to resize/partition, etc...Just google it and download. Read some documentation first, but it is pretty easy to use.

Thanks. I have used it before if you mean gparted for resizing and I messed everything up and wound up formatting and loading from scratch. I'll try it again with the most recent version.

Parted Magic is not GParted, different programs that do similar things. I would expect that win 7 must have some type of program to shrink partitions and that would be the first option, use a windows program to work on a windows partition. If not, Parted Magic works well.

I ran into this problem also and had to reformat. Problem I discovered was that the resize program called gnu parted in some way that caused chaos.

Start with a resize. Be aware you have resized a filesystem, not a partition. Then shrink the partition.