Proper disk partitioning for Linux Mint?

Question

linux

Followed the guide to put Mint in parallel with Windows. However, it turned out that all 4 main sections already exist:

What can be done in this case? Just compress sda5 and create root, swap and home next to it?

Answer 1

Make one of the main partitions non-main) In your case, this is probably "New Volume"

Answer 2

Make the partition with Windows logical (I suppose this is the ACER partition). Windows 7 is able to be loaded from logical, just checked.
Yes, and the Linux section can also be made logical.
In gparted, you cannot change the type of the created partition, but this can be done in proprietary disk partition editors, for example, Minitool Partition Wizard (free for non-commercial use)

Answer 3

1. You probably have a GPT disk, not MBR, so your actions will most likely kill Windows.
Don't use old guides.
2. No need to put 2 systems in parallel on one computer, and even more so on one disk.
Use virtual machines. The difference in performance will not be significant.

Answer 4

First - / dev / sda4 you have extended, i.e. you can create more partitions inside it - you can reduce /dev/sda5 and create a partition under / there. If the system is set to "try" and at least 4GB of RAM, then it is possible without swap. And, in fact, without /home too, because usually the system does not live long "to try". But, as it was already correctly suggested, now you can safely use virtual machines for tests, primarily VirtualBox (because it is free and free, at the same time it is quite stable and nimble). Thus, you don’t need to touch the disk either (there is no risk of data loss), and in terms of performance - if you don’t run games in a virtual machine, then you won’t notice a drop in speed.