Как сделать раздел в Windows для дистрибутива Linux?

Make Room for Linux: You’ll need free space on your Windows system drive to install Linux, or possibly a second entirely different hard drive if you have a desktop PC, resize your Windows system partition to make room for Linux, most Linux installers allow you to resize Windows NTFS partitions, so you can do this during the installation process, you can shrink your Windows system partition from within Windows itself to avoid any potential problems.

Open the Disk Management, press Windows Key + R, type diskmgmt.msc into the Run dialog, and press Enter. Right-click the Windows system partition — that’s likely your C:\ drive — and select “Shrink Volume.” Shrink it to free up space for your new Linux system. then you can install Linux.

Hope it helps.

DO NOT USE THE STANDARD WINDOWS UTILITIES TO CREATE PARTITIONS TO WHICH YOU'LL INSTALL LINUX!!!!

On a BIOS-based install (using an MBR disk), Windows' tools tend to convert a disk from a conventional setup to one that uses the Logical Disk Manager (LDM) system, which is next to impossible to use for Linux installation. This is most likely to happen when you increase the number of partitions beyond 4. If this happens, you'll have to jump through some hoops to convert back from LDM to a regular setup. The risk of this happening is much lower on a newer GPT disk (used on EFI-based installations, which includes the vast majority of pre-installed Windows 8 and later systems), but even on such systems, your Linux install might need or want to use multiple partitions, so unless you know what you're doing, you really shouldn't be trying to set them up within Windows. Instead, leave it to the Linux partitioning tools that run as part of the Linux installation.

Given your symptom ("when I try to install my Linux distro it only recognises the main hard drive, and not the partitions within it"), I'd say that your partition table is damaged, or at least a little quirky. Linux's libparted tool, which is used by most Linux installation programs, tends to flake out when it sees the slightest problem, resulting in the disk appearing to be a unpartitioned. Preparing partitions in Windows will not fix this problem, so you'll end up with a risk of new problems and a 0% chance of proceeding further with your installation. Instead, I recommend you fix the problem. I describe the problem, and how to fix it, in more detail on this page of mine. In brief, my FixParts program, which is part of the gdisk package in most Linux distributions, can probably fix the problem more-or-less automatically. In some cases, more manual repairs will be necessary, but it's impossible to provide specific advice without more information. I recommend you read the two pages linked to earlier in this paragraph and see what FixParts tells you about the disk. If you've got stray GPT data on an MBR disk or some other problem that FixParts can easily repair, use FixParts to deal with the issue. If that doesn't help, post back with more details, including the output of the following Linux commands:

sudo parted /dev/sda print sudo gdisk -l /dev/sda sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda 

(These all assume that the disk in question is /dev/sda. If you've got multiple disks, it might need to be /dev/sdb or something else.) Edit your original question to add this information, adding four spaces to the start of each line of program output to help keep it legible. (Four spaces at the start of each line is a signal to this site to use a monospace font and not mess with formatting; otherwise this site will try to format the text as if it were an English paragraph, which reduces legibility of program output.)