I have a 250GB SSD in my laptop, about 170GB are occupied, which means I have almost 80GB free. I wanted to create a second partition, but I can assign a maximum of 17GB. Why is that so? And can I change that?
With such a small hard drive, you should not create a second partition.
It doesn't make any sense.
If you would partition a 1,000, that would be something else, but with Win 10 it is actually not that important anymore since the over-installation without data loss works much better than in the previous versions.
The goal is to install a Linux distribution on the second partition, there's not enough space for this. Still the question: Why can I only get 17GB of the 80 available for a second partition?
The files are only written tightly packed into the partition at the beginning; once there's enough space available, the files are written to wherever there's something free. There are gaps on the partition.
However, a partition is always a contiguous area; Space for a new partition can therefore only be reduced to the end of the rearmost file.
There are various tools for moving the files together. You will find information in every Linux forum that is aimed at normal users.
By the way, you should keep at least 10% of a partition free, otherwise the file system has to juggle too often to accommodate another file, and larger temporary files can almost completely paralyze the system. But there's also advice in relevant forums, including how to "outsource" files sensibly.
If you actually need more than 120 GB of data, I would also consider installing a 512 GB SSD (or an additional 256 - you would have an independent disk on which Linux can let off steam; many laptops have a 2. Recess for a second plate).
There's also reserved hard drive space e.g. For swap files. I'm not sure if this will be calculated as free or used space. That would explain about twice the RAM as a reservation.
And a lot has to be reserved for the user profile as well, because everything is packed in there, quickly a few gigabytes are full again.
If you want to run Linux on the computer, take the other HDD that you have safely in the PC. Either way, you will definitely need the space on the SSD differently.
Since Linux is quite flexible you could e.g. It can also be played on a 32 GB stick. If this is a USB 3 stick and is plugged into a USB 3 port, the speed is not as bad as you might expect. Of course, no comparison with a HDD or SSD, but certainly sufficient for most private use.
