For a free and high quality professional utility for either partitioning your hard drive, OR saving (backing up) an exact disk image of your hard drive, I recommend getting Parted Magic or else Parted Magic Clonezilla. Check it out and download it here. Do this by then clicking on the pmagic iso.zip file or the pmagic_clonezilla iso.zip file. (Be sure to get the latest version.) Then unzip it and copy the extracted file to a CD as an image file. For those of you who know how to perform a MD5SUM check on your downloaded file to check it for accuracy, you can find the MD5SUM check code here.
You may also backup your entire hard drive exactly via the imaging utility within Parted Magic. Run either Parted Magic or else Parted Magic Clonezilla in this specific way: FIRST place the CD that you have prepared (with the ISO image of Parted Magic or Parted Magic Clonezilla on it) into the CD/DVD drive of your computer. Then exit the operating system and shutdown your computer. After your computer has completely turned OFF, remove power from it for about 30 seconds to a minute. Then restore power to your computer and reboot. For most computers, the BIOS system will cause the computer to look at the CD/DVD drive first for any bootable media (such as the Parted Magic ISO). I suggest that you let Parted Magic run in default mode and run the program from RAM. It will load the appropriate programs into RAM (which takes a minute or two). After they completely load, the CD will be ejected. (In the default mode, it is designed to run without the CD.) Click on the Partition Editor icon and run the Partition Editor program. When you have finished, click on the icon which is an image of a disk at the lower left corner of the screen and choose Logout. (Don't choose anything else for the moment.) If you want to now install Ubuntu Linux, now is the time to place the Ubuntu CD in your computer's CD/DVD drive. Then choose "Reboot."