How to make room for an additional distro

[Avi Greenbury]

Pongo Pan wrote:
> On Thu, 2012-09-13 at 23:14 +0200, John D. Herron wrote:
> > Hi, all.
> > 
> > I'm running a Windows-free Intel 32-bit machine with Ubuntu 12.04
> > preinstalled on a 1 TB harddisk in a single partition which seems to
> > span the entire HDD, although at this time it occupies only about 25
> > GB of space.
> > Would like to install and dual-boot the latest Linux Mint alongside
> > with the Ubuntu.
> > How do I go about doing that without ruining the original Ubuntu
> > content? 
> > Thanks for helping out.
> > 
> > jdh
> > 
> 
> Install gparted, the Gnome partitioner, and shrink the primary partition
> you have now (may take a long time: run this overnight) and then add an
> extended partition in which you can make as many logical partitions for
> more distros as you like.

This will not work; you cannot resize the partitions on a disk that is
in use, so you cannot resize the partitions on a disk containing the
operating system you are using.

You could boot off a live CD (such as Parted Magic), but it seems a
bit of a convoluted process - boot off a live CD to resize partitions,
then boot off a different live CD to install the system - when the
Mint install CD will be able to perform both tasks.

-- 
Avi