Unallocated space

[czerdrill]

Maybe you need to Swapoff your swap partition first.

How would I do that...sorry for the noobness

[Is Mise]

It's ok, I should have explained better. Right-click on your swap partition in gparted and select Swapoff.

[srs5694]

Ubuntu has full access to the Windows hard drive, so you could easily store data files there without worrying about partitions.

This is unwise. Linux doesn't understand most of the NTFS security features that Windows uses, which means that it's easy to accidentally trash your Windows installation from Linux if you muck about in there on a regular basis. Furthermore, although the general consensus is that NTFS-3g is pretty reliable, I wouldn't want to bet on its being as reliable as or more reliable than Microsoft's own NTFS implementation. Although many people do as you describe without problems for months or even years, I have seen horror stories of problems developing. It's best not to risk it unnecessarily.

Ok just tried this and then I get "Unable to satisfy constraints on partition" when I try to grow my ubuntu partition. Any idea what that means?

This seems to occur because of rounding that libparted does to align partitions to cylinder (old-style) or 1MiB (new-style) boundaries, when surrounding partitions don't align in this way. There's a check box or option in one of the dialog boxes that enables you to set alignment to cylinder, alignment to 1 MiB boundary (on the newest versions), or no alignment. Adjust that setting and the problem should go away. If you still have problems, try leaving the smallest gap possible between the partitions and it should work.

If you still have problems, try posting a screen shot of the GParted window, and perhaps any error messages you see.

[czerdrill]

This is unwise. Linux doesn't understand most of the NTFS security features that Windows uses, which means that it's easy to accidentally trash your Windows installation from Linux if you muck about in there on a regular basis. Furthermore, although the general consensus is that NTFS-3g is pretty reliable, I wouldn't want to bet on its being as reliable as or more reliable than Microsoft's own NTFS implementation. Although many people do as you describe without problems for months or even years, I have seen horror stories of problems developing. It's best not to risk it unnecessarily.



This seems to occur because of rounding that libparted does to align partitions to cylinder (old-style) or 1MiB (new-style) boundaries, when surrounding partitions don't align in this way. There's a check box or option in one of the dialog boxes that enables you to set alignment to cylinder, alignment to 1 MiB boundary (on the newest versions), or no alignment. Adjust that setting and the problem should go away. If you still have problems, try leaving the smallest gap possible between the partitions and it should work.

If you still have problems, try posting a screen shot of the GParted window, and perhaps any error messages you see.

so should it be set at cylinder or no alignment? it defaults to 1MiB.

[czerdrill]

It's ok, I should have explained better. Right-click on your swap partition in gparted and select Swapoff.

I will try this also...thanks!

[czerdrill]

so should it be set at cylinder or no alignment? it defaults to 1MiB.

Just bumping this...should it be cylinder or no alignment?

[czerdrill]

Solved it by leaving 1Mib between partitions. Thanks for your help.

[srs5694]

so should it be set at cylinder or no alignment? it defaults to 1MiB.

Try all the options.

The old cylinder alignment improved disk performance on the disks of 25 years ago. Very old versions of DOS require cylinder alignment. Today it's meaningless at best, unless you're running one of those old DOS versions.

The modern 1 MiB alignment improves disk performance on some devices -- namely, Advanced Format disks, SSD disks, and some types of RAID array. It serves no purpose on most single disks, but it also does no harm, so it's being used as the new standard.

If you've got a conventional spinning disk with true 512-byte sectors, partitions can start anywhere (no alignment) and it will work fine.

Mixing and matching can cause utilities to get confused (as illustrated by this thread), but once it's set up, Linux (and most or all other modern OSes) will be fine with it.

[yunone]

i am in a similar boat as the OP, i am dual booting and shrank my WIN7 partition and now have unallocated space between WIN7 and UBUNTU. 34gb/43gb/71gb . i want to take that newly freed up 43gb unallocated space and add it to my 71gb ubuntu partition but when i right click or use the menu to resize the ubuntu partition it says i already have the maximum space for the ubuntu partition, 71gb. Argh i want to extend the Ubuntu partition.

any other ideas?

thanks in advance

[Quackers]

yunone, please post a screenshot of your gparted window, if that's what you are using.