Creating partition in pre-installed windows and installing Linux as 2nd OS

[MonajMondal]

Hello,

I brought a HP laptop recently, there it has pre-installed  windows 10 home . Now I am thinking to add another OS like Linux to this. But for that I need to create a partition first, currently complete drive is a single partition.

My Question is:

1. Is it safe to create partition after windows installed ( like mine). I used to do partition before installing OS. I can see there is a partition manager application available, but I am afraid to use if ,thinking it might corrupt the Windows.

2. In case something goes wrong while I am doing partition with the partition manager , Is there any way to recover my windows if it get corrupted. There are no recovery CD provided with my purchase and there are no CD drive also.

Thanks in advance,

Monaj

[WAWood]

@MonajMondal 

Creating new partitions requires the shrinking of existing partitions to make room -- and the WORSE way to do this is to use the Ubuntu side-by-side option to let that installer do the repartitioning -- as that nearly always results in corrupting the Windows install in the process.

If you are seriously worried about corrupting Windows, then your best bet is to NOT install any Linux distro but instead, run Linux from a USB stick.  While it will be slower, it does not risk corrupting Windows.  You would have to read up about doing this using the support forums for the Linux distro you want to use.