Want to reduce number of partitions to make dual boot for Win 7 and Linux

usafsarge

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I have 4 partitions on my C drive. I may need to reduce that down to three to create a partition for Linux Mint 17.3 (dual boot setup), but might be able to work with what I currently have. My current partitions are viewed as follows with Disk Manager:

Starting from the left part of the Disk Manager window, and going to the right side

1) 13.67 GB Recovery Partition

2) 100 MB System Active Primary Partition

3) C drive - 142.16 GB Boot, Crash Dump, Pate File, Primary Partition

4) D drive 775.58 GB Primary Partition (there is no data in this partition, at all)

Can I use the D drive (which is on the same HDD as the other three partitions) for installing Linux? Since it's empty, I thought I might be able to install it there. Or, I might have to get rid of one of the partitions. That question brought me to this forum.

Thank you for any help you can give me. Much appreciated.

 
Solution
Yes, you can install Linux on the D partition.

Indeed, that's the only place you can put Linux in your drive's current configuration.

Any other solution would entail a fair amount of uneccesary partition creation work.

usafsarge

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Thank you for your speedy reply, Phillip. Much appreciated. I'm trying to see how I can make Linux use that D partition. For some reason, it ended up on my external hard drive I used for backing up my internal hard drive. Ouch! That ended up formatting part of my ext. hard drive in ext4 format. I'm backing up my external hard drive onto another one, and then will get rid of the ext4 partition and reclaim the NTFS file format. It gets tricky.

I'm not sure how the installation of Linux ended up on the external drive. There seems to be no way of steering Linux to a desired partition. I'll have to look up more info on that.

Thanks again, Phillip! Good to know someone out there is smarter than I!