Shrink hard disk partition on Windows 8

The original partitions on my hard disk are as follows:

Please excuse the poor quality of the picture. For some reasons I didn't think of taking a screenshot but used my Galaxy 2 camera instead. So we have here:

1. Recovery Partition (Windows recovery partition)
2. EFI system (This is the boot partition)
3. OEM partition (I read somewhere that this is where Lenovo saves some important data about the laptop when they set it up)
4. Windows 8_OS C drive
5. Lenovo D drive
6. Recovery partition (This is the Lenovo recovery key partition)

 A few original concerns which I had:

1. Win 8 took up so many partition and I thought that with the limit of 4 primary partitions, I may not have enough partitions for Linux.

There was actually nothing to be worried about. The hard disk was partitioned using GUID Partition Table (GPT) which, unlike MBR, can support more than 4 partitions. (128 according to the Wikipedia)

2. I have read many discussions by Lenovo users that altering the partition table will somehow render the Lenovo recovery key useless.

I decided to give it a go anyway because I have backed up my drive using Clonezilla. Anyway, it turned out that resizing the C: drive didn't kill Lenovo Recovery as long as I left the Recovery partition, which is the last one in the picture with 13GB intact. I just resized C: drive and started Lenovo Recovery to backup the new drive and all was well.

On with the resizing:

1. First of all, I deleted D drive which contained all the drivers file needed for the laptop (after copying the files over to C drive).

2. Then I used Disk Management to resize C drive. The first thing that I noticed was that I could only shrink the partition to half of its original size. When I tried to shrink it further, this message came up:

You cannot shrink a volume beyond the point where any unmovable files are located. 

After reading through some workarounds and articles regarding this problem on the net, the solution which worked for me was found on this page. 3 steps:

i. Disable hibernation

ii. Disable paging

iii. Disable system protection (system restore)

I ran Disk Defrag just for good measure and after that I could shrink C drive as much as I wanted. I shrank it down to about 80GB and was left with nearly 900GB of free space. Perfect, as Windows 8 is just going to be an ornamental system on my laptop. :)

Next up: Install Ubuntu