partition or shrinking?
 

what is the difference between partitioning and shrinking? I don't wanna delete my hard drive, but apparently it is to my advantage to install certain linux distributions on a partition.

Thanx, M@tt.

When you shrink a partition, you lower its size to make freespace on your harddisk. This freespace can be used to create another partition.

Partitioning is dividing your harddisk into one or more partitions.

The first technique doesn't erase your existing partitions (however, it is not without riscs).

The second technique does erase the partitions that are touched.

The safest way to proceed is buy a new harddisk and disconnect your existing harddisk while installing on the new partition.

if you need to create a new partition with data already on an existing one and just need to shrink it and then create a new one, your best bet would be to use something like partition magic or something related. its software designed to do all of this.