Hi,

I just recently purchased a new Thinkpad T430i with a 500GB HD which came with Windows 7 Home Premium pre-installed. I have some experience with Linux but it's rusty and I'd like to jump back in. Ideally I'd like to have both Oracle Linux (which is essentially Red Hat Enterprise) and gentoo in addition to the Windows that's already on there. I'm not sure how to proceed with the partitioning though. I was hoping that the Linux installers would allow me to resize the partition but I burned an ISO for Oracle and it looks like that's not the case. It does list the current layout which looks like this:

Hard Drives
sda
sda1 1500 ntfs
sda2 461438 ntfs
sda3 14000 ntfs

sdb
sdb1 15271 Unknown

Sdb I think is flash memory or something that we can ignore. It looks like Windows 7 created 3 partitions. Does anyone know why? In any event, how should I proceed? Am I going to have to find some free tool somewhere to shrink the partition? And if I do that can anyone suggest how small I should make it? What about sda3? Is windows using it? I'm not absolutely married to the idea of keeping windows around and I may decide to just blow it away, but if it's not too difficult I wouldn't mind having it.

If anyone can point me in the right direction, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks.

-ts1971

Your partitions are:
sda1: Windows boot-partition
sda2: Windows system partition
sda3: most likely the recovery partition

To proceed further I would recommend to use Windows' in-built partition manager to shrink the Windows partition, then use the installer to create logical partitions for Linux.

Hi Tobi,

Thanks for that. You're right about sda3. I just burned and booted from GParted and I can see that sda3 is labeled Lenovo_Recovery. Having already gone to the trouble of getting started with GParted is there really any reason to use the windows built in partition tool? Are you even sure that such a thing exists in Windows 7 Home edition? I know that the last time I went through this exercise several years ago there was no tool on whatever version of windows that was. My plan then is to leave the boot (obviously) and recovery partitions unchanged and shrink the main windows partition from 450 GB to 150 GB. Then using their respective installers I'll create a 150 GB logical partition for each Linux Distribution. Does that seem reasonable?

Thanks again for your input.

windows 7 does have a partition tool. you can easily find it by logging in as the administrator, opening the start menu and typing 'partition'. it'll come up in there. I recommend the windows partition manager to shrink the windows as well. the advantage of this is that it is a lot less likely to corrupt the partition. sometimes when you shrink a windows partition with gpart, it will no longer boot and you'll then have to repair it with the windows recovery disk. I have had to do this before and one time even the recovery disk couldn't repair it and I had to do it manually through the windows command line which I am very uneducated on, managed to fluke it blindly following commands I found on the net. not an ideal situation, take the windows partition tool when you can, when dealing with the windows partition.

I usually trust the Windows tools more when it comes to manage Windows partitions. Unfortunately Microsoft has set an arbitrary limit into the partitioning tool, it will not allow you to shrink the partition more than to the half of its initial size. So in your case GParted is in fact the tool to use. I would recommend, after shrinking the Windows partition, to use it to create an extended partition over the whole size of the free space. This partition will be used as a container for the logical partitions. I have seen sometimes installers creating an extended partition that was only the size of the logical partitions it creates, which can lead to problems later on.

As usually, don't forget to make a backup first.