Hi
silver2049, I can see you are having some issues understanding
GParted. The following is a guide to what you need to do. Please read it thoroughly before trying to replicate the process on your system. I hope this helps.
First thing, Have you
backed up all of your critical data that is on your
NTFS “PASSPORT” partition? For example, photos, videos, music, important documents etc.
Taking the time to do this could save you a lot of grief if by chance, it all goes horribly wrong.
You need to be running a live
Peppermint Five session using your Live Media USB Stick/CD/DVD. Once that has booted up, plug in your external hard drive, if you have not already done this. Next, navigate to,
menu > System Tools > GParted. When this has opened, look at the top right corner under the close button. You will see a box with up and down arrows. Click on this and select your external hard drive from the drop down menu. You will now be presented with a visual representation of your external hard drive's partition table. Right click on the partition that is your
NTFS "PASSPORT”. Make sure from the dropdown menu, the partition is unmounted. It will probably be greyed out - that's good.
You will not be able to edit the partition(s) on your external hard drive if it is mounted. Select,
Resize/Move. In the new window that opens, grab with your mouse cursor the right end of the partition. You will see a double headed arrow. Pull it with your left mouse button depressed, so it leaves an empty space behind it. This is numerically visible in the,
Free space following (MiB): field. This is the space you are going use for your Peppermint installation. If you wanted to have a partition of 8GB. You will need 6676MiB in the,
Free space following (MiB): field. To bring it up to 20GB you will need 19073MiB. To bring it up to 40GB, you will need, 38147MiB. Rather than fiddling with the slider, you can enter these figures into the
Free space following (MiB): field manually. Once you have established your shrinkage, click on
Resize. Check to see it has resized correctly and close the window. In the taskbar at the top of the GParted window, click on the,
Apply All Operations check/tick.
NOTHING IS PERMANENT UNTIL YOU COMPLETE THIS PART. You will receive a warning/cautionary message. You can ignore this because naturally, you have backed up all your critical data, right

! Click Okay or, whatever it is to proceed with the process. This could take some time, as
GParted is moving a lot of data. So sit back and let it do its thing. Its a good time for a coffee. Once it has completed, exit
GParted That's it. You have shrunk your
NTFS “PASSPORT” partition and created an empty partition space for
Peppermint Five - good luck

!!