I've got hold of a new(to me) laptop with Windows on it. I'm looking to install LMDE on it. The computer currently has 4 partitions. 1: NTFS 100GB partition (boot), 2: Fat32, 15GB partition (hidden), 3: NTFS 183GB partition, 4: 16MB unknown partition.

I want to shrink the 183GB one and put a Ext4 partition next to it, but GParted tells me so helpfully I cannot do that, I must create an extended partition. I cannot see any way to achieve this without deleting one of the many existing partitions, which I do not want to do.

How can I create a new partition without losing data? What I would like to do is move the existing partitions into an extended partition but cannot do that without deleting them.

Thanks

I believe the limit is 4 partitions per typical physical drive but not completely sure, but at least your data is backed up.
Do you plan to dual boot or just use linux? Personally I would divide it up for windows and linux over 4 partitions. The window's side getting it's boot partition and it's root volume and the linux side getting about the same boot size and the rest the root volume.

If only using linux you have more choices, say, a boot partition, a home partition, swap, and root. There may be other choices you will discover. Here is a wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning

Good luck.

I want to dual boot, otherwise I would gladly just delete these partitions. If Gparted would let me add a partition and then move some of the primary partitions into the extended it would be great. It's taken me over two hours to install Linux so far with no end in sight!

you can have 4 primary partitions .
But you can also create secondary partition .
Linux will boot from a secondary partition

I deleted the second NTFS partition and I'll hope for the best. It had 3GB of data on so I'm guess it wasn't used for much.