Originally Posted by
audiomick
You've pretty much got it. There is this restriction, unless you are using the newer type of partition table (EFI or GPT or both. I'm still learning), that you can only have 4 primary partitions. Your screenshot shows four, which is likely to be the reason why the remaining space is coming up as unusable, as has already been posted.
What you can do, also mentioned already, is to set up one of four the allowed primary partitions as an extended partition. Inside of that you can then create a large number of extended partitions. There is a limit. I forget how many, but it is something like 64, I think.
Windows must be installed on a primary partition. Linux systems can happily be installed in an extended partition.
I assume that there is little or no data in your current sda4, and that sda3 is the win8 install. If there is data on there, move it out. Also, you are going to be doing some more partitioning, so back up anything at all that is on the computer that you can't afford to lose. Partitioning is safe, but if it does go wrong, it is possible that absolutely everything is gone from the drive.
So, having done any necessary backups, delete sda4, assuming this is really the partition you had intended as a storage partition. This will leave you with some 400GB of unallocated space at the end of the drive.
Make all of this space into an extended partition.
I like to put my /home on a seperate partition. Doing this means that if I have to re-install, all my config files, and any data I have in there, can simply be re-mounted at /home during the new install. I would do
a partition for / of about 15GB. Up until recently, I though 10GB to be more than enough, but the other week I had to enlarge the / on a friends computer because the 8GB or so that it had had gotten full.
a partition for /home. If your weren't going to have that shared data partition, I would say the rest of the space for that. Since you are going to be using a data partition, you can make it whatever you think useful. I read claims of people only leaving 1GB for their home. I think that is overdoing things. If you are consistent with storing your data to the data partition, however, 20GB or so should be more than ample.
a swap partition that is a little larger than your RAM. The standby function will only work properly if this is the case. The function writes the contents of RAM onto the swap space, so there needs to be room for that. If you are sure you will never need standby, the 1GB or so should be enough for normal computing.
the remainder as an ntfs partition for data sharing.
If you boot into the live environment, the "try without changing" option on the CD or USB installer, you can do the partition work with gparted. If you want the separate /home, you need to choose the manual partitioning option during the install. That is the "something else" at the point where you can choose "install beside windows" or "use the whole drive".
The only thing I don't know is if Win8 will automagically find the data partition once all this is done.
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