Repartitioning Help

[ntzrmtthihu777]

Yep, perfectly achievable.

-rubs hands manically- alrighty then!
Question is, I tried doing this with my (admittedly limited) knowledge of partition manipulation, and could not figure it out. I was using Gparted from a USB install of 12.04 I use for troubleshooting other pc's and as a general toolkit.

[Bucky Ball]

Yep, that is the way to do it (running from a LiveUSB or LiveCD) as you can unmount all partitions (they need to be unmounted to resize; impossible if you are running Ubuntu from a partition you want to resize).

If resizing Windows partition though use the Win software to do that, not Gparted. It can cause problems with newer versions of Win.

[ntzrmtthihu777]

Yep, that is the way to do it (running from a LiveUSB or LiveCD) as you can unmount all partitions (they need to be unmounted to resize; impossible if you are running Ubuntu from a partition you want to resize).

If resizing Windows partition though use the Win software to do that, not Gparted. It can cause problems with newer versions of Win.

...win$ partitions?! Mah 'top is pure linux buddy ...
Ok I fibbed, I do have a winXP VM to run some software there is no good linux alternative to... yet... and simply do not work under wine.

[Bucky Ball]

All good then.

[ntzrmtthihu777]

Again though, I need help here. I simply could not figure out how to do it myself, and I am deathly terrified of scragging up again -shudder- my whole /home partition was destroyed when I tried my hand at arch, and I consider myself fortuneate I had most of my personal data backed up via Dropbox, although I now have 2 useless gpg keys that I can't get rid of now.

Personal advice and/or a instructive link would be appreciated.

[Bucky Ball]

Well, boot from a liveusb or disk, once at the desktop launch Gparted, right click on partitions to make sure they are unmounted, delete sda5, shrink sda2. This should leave the free space now outside of the extended partition (sda2) right next to sda1 and you simply expand sda1 into it and up to the beginning of sda2.

Hope that helps.

[ntzrmtthihu777]

Hrm, coulda sworn that's what I did, oh well :shrug: will give it a shot. Off topic, but being staff as you are perhaps you could explain something to me:

In my details it refuses to show the location I put, it reads ザーワ＆ but should be ザーワイヤード (Za Waiyaado - kana for The Wired, little geek anime reference), is there something I am missing here?

[Bucky Ball]

Sounds like you have all valuable data backed up already but if not, make sure you have before attempting this rejig.

Hmm. Not sure about that second question. I would post that in Forum Feedback & Help sub-forum and get one of the Admins to have a look. Maybe it is having problems with some of the characters but as you can post them here I'm not sure why that would be. It also doesn't appear to be too long ...

[ntzrmtthihu777]

-heaves a huge sigh of relief-
It worked. Apparently the crucial step I was missing was to swapoff. I deleted sda5, shrank sda2 away from sda1, and grew sda1 into the resultant free space, thereby achieving my goal.

I have noticed that gparted and the ubuntu installer system must use a different definition of a gigabyte, the latter reported my 32gb root partition as such, but gparted (and conky, now that I look at it) reports it as somewhere in the region of 29.8 gb... strange but not crippling.

Puzzling, mostly. I rather wish everything in my box would agree on what is what (nautilus reports my new root as being 64, but conky and gparted show 58.7 and 59.61 respectively)

Marking thread as solved.

[Bucky Ball]

Great news and glad it all worked. You can mark as 'Solved' from Thread Tools at top right of this page.

As for the size discrepancies, one sees the total size of the drive and the other would show the available size of the drive excluding the space used by essential system files I would think. All good.