Partitioning linux mint: gparted does not allow creation of primary partition?

Question

I am trying to resize an existing Linux Mint main partition by shrinking it down to 100 GiB so I can dual boot another OS.

I tried booting into a live session of GPARTED from a usb and while I can shrink the existing partition, when I try to create a partition in the unallocated space, I can only make a logical partition. The other two options, namely: primary and extended are greyed out. I have read that you only install an OS in a primary partition:

Should I redo the base mint installation all over again? Or is there anything that can be done from this point onwards?

Answer 1

The problem here is that this is formatted with a legacy/MBR format partition table. In this configuration, there can only be four primary partitions, and if you want more than four partitions, you must make one of the four an "extended" partition.

The extended partition can then have secondary partitions with in it. In your case, nvme0n1p5 and all of the rest of the free space is in the extended partition (which is nvme0n1p2), so there is no free space to create another primary partition.

You might be able to shrink the extended partition and create primary partitions from the released space.

Or it might be easier to start over from scratch, and if your hardware supports it, switch to uefi booting with a gpt partition table which doesn't have these limitations.