hard drive - Creating new partition on an already dual boot laptop without loosing data

Well, I bought my Lenovo X220t with preinstalled windows 7HP and worked with it for 2 years. After release of windows 8.1 I gave it a try by creating new partition and enabled my PC to dual boot with either Windows 7 or 8.1. Still I need one extra partition to archive my data but actually now I have data on both OSs and I have no plan to erase either one at least in near future.

Now I have 4 primary partitions:

1. SYSTEM_DRV (system, active, primary partition)


2. D: Windows 7_OS (Primary Partition)


3. C: Windows 8 (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)


4. Lenovo Recovery (Primary Partition)

I want to use empty space in drive D to be my new partition and I know that I can't create another primary partition (I shrank Drive D and created unallocated space which I couldn't set it as true partition as it needs to be only on dynamic disk) . I think that I should change Drive D to Extended so that I can create more logical drives out of it.

Please tell me how to do so WITHOUT any data loss. (I found some methods which said data loss is possible)

Thank you

Answer

Data loss is possible any time you repartition a drive, as it's a dangerous act in which small errors can produce large problems. That's why most (if not all) partitioning programs warn you that there may be data loss.

This is primarily because a large part of repartitioning is rewriting the index of where all the files are located on the drive, what they are named, etc. If this index becomes corrupted (in the slightest) then the OS won't be able to find folders and files on the drive anymore.

It also often takes a long time to preform single operations, like moving the data around, during partition changes. This greatly increases the chances of something going wrong while it's happening.

Make a backup of the drive (or at leas the data) before you do ANY repartitioning, it's the only way to be safe.

Once you have that backup done, grab a LiveCD with GPartEd on it (or another partitioning solution of your choice) and partition away until your heart's content. :)