I'm pretty bad at the whole computer literacy thing, but for the most part I can Google things pretty well. From what I've read, partitioning deallocates everything on the partition that is getting modified. However, I've also read on the Installer package that if it's installed alongside my current OS, I won't lose my stuff (I've got Windows 8, and UEFI kinda sucks, but I can get the try Ubuntu to work. It's just not a cursor based GUI, and it's a lot less pretty). Does Ubuntu Desktop identify and reallocate everything as it was? Because I gotta say, if it does, that's pretty rad. If not, while I've got backups, I don't want to reinstall software. I can just wait until I get a new laptop and use have the clean slate with a dual boot.
Thanks,
If this is on another thread, please point me in the right way. I've spent 40 minutes trekking through these forums.