Installing to my hard drive with Mint 18.3 in use

[awsim]

I want to install Mx 17 on my hard drive which already has Mint Cinnamon installed on it.If I use the install button displayed on the opening page of the install of MX17 on my bootable usb will the installation partition the hard drive and do the install automatically without a affecting Mint or wiping the data already on the hard drive

[dolphin_oracle]

No.

You need to manually do your partitions. there is a link to gparted in the installer, or you can run gparted from the live-usb ahead of time.

[Stevo]

You also need to decide if you want Mint's boot manager to handle GRUB, or install and use MX's. You'll be asked if you want to install GRUB during the install process. If you keep Mint's, you'll have to boot to Mint and run "update-grub" in it.

[awsim]

When partitioning the hard drive I would like to reduce the size of the partition used by Mint . Can this be done without affecting the Mint install and if so how much space %age wise should be left in the Mint partition.Will this work Mint and MX 17 root partition 15 GiB each,Home 35 GiB, Swap 3Gib

[Stevo]

Yes, you can shrink the Mint partitions, though because of the way that Linux file systems distribute the files evenly through the partition, this may take hours and hours, depending on how much Mint data has to be moved. You can have Mint and MX share the same swap partition if you don't use hibernation in either one, since MX and maybe Mint put the hibernation file in the swap partition. Your partition sizes look OK to me.

[awsim]

Can I partition my hard drive when booted into MX17 on my usb persistent stick. My understanding is that I cant do this while operating my hard drive .Is there any connection between my hard drive and the usb stick and my hdd because I need to unmount the partition to alter it and the actiion for this is greyed out.Thanks in anticipation.

[Stevo]

Yes, you should be able to use GParted from a live MX session to shrink the Mint Partions and create new ones for MX in the new empty space.

In what program are you seeing the unmount option as greyed out?