Four Partitions: Which One To Kill?

[Sheba]

To prepare for installing Mint on my HP Pavilion g4 laptop, I shrank the (C:) partition. But when I try to install, the freed-up space was unusable. I read that there can be only four primary partitions on a hard drive. These are on mine:

(C:)
HP_TOOLS
Recovery (D:)
SYSTEM

I want to dual-boot Mint with Win7. Which partition do I get rid of?

[catweazel]

There can also be up to three primary partitions and a logical partition, which can hold even more partitions.

First up, I wouldn't go deleting any of those partitions unless you are certain you have a complete working set of recovery disks available.

Second, you should make at least one verified backup of your treasured data before you even contemplate installing any linux OS.

Third, you'll need to a logical partition if you want to get another OS onto that disk. I suspect you don't have one, which would cause that spare space you created to be unavailable in the Mint installer.

To be honest, and I mean no disrespect here, since you had to ask about what to do, I think you might be setting yourself up for failure. Doing what you want to do is not for the feint of heart. You could very well end up with no Windows and no way to recover anything. However, that said, it's your system.

I would recommend that you leave your Windows system alone, check if your laptop can boot from USB external drives, and buy a small, fast external hard disk then install to that. Really, I'd rather see you not install any linux than put you at risk of clobbering everything.

[sammiev]

Great info above.

I make a few verified copies of the whole HD. My secondary backup system is a USB HD . Then I drop the tools to install Linux.

[Sheba]

I have an external hard drive for backups, but I don't want to give it over entirely to Mint. Running the live dvd should keep me occupied until I can get another drive.