I just purchased a new Dell Inspiron 5558 laptop with built-in installed Ubuntu 14.04, that has a single partition and I have only one problem: I want to shrink my 1TB drive partition; this Partition has installed Ubuntu and all of my user data installed in it. I want to make a second 500GB partition.
How do I create a second partition from this single one without losing any data?
You have to boot to a LiveUSB in order to safely resize the partition. Using gparted on the LiveUSB, you can shrink the existing ext4 partition down to make room for another partition. You can then add a new partition for storing data there (if Windows needs to read it, then that new partition needs to be NTFS).
Back up your OS before messing with the partitioning though, sometimes you can lose data, although you should be OK if all you're doing is shrinking the partition (and the process doesn't get interrupted).
