I have two 250BG hard drives in my computer. Sda holds my system (Precise 12.04 and files) while sdb formerly was broken into three partitions. First partition was formatted to ext3 and held my Ubuntu systems (first 9.10 and later 10.04). The second partition was NTFS and functioned as a Windows backup to XP which was on Drive A. The third partition was a small swap partition for Ubuntu.
Now that I've replaced Windows on Drive A entirely with Ubuntu 12.04, I want to turn Drive B into two ext4 partitions for Linux backup and storage (no more Windows on this computer).
I opened sdb in Gparted (installed version) and tried to eliminate the swap partition and then evenly divide the HD into two more or less equal sized ext4 partitions. But approximately half of the HD is apparently still under the influence of NTFS and I get an error message on any actions involving it, such as re-sizing, re-formatting to ext4 or even deleting it. Sometimes an error message will say Gparted cannot identify the file system and other times I get a message that the partition is in use and no actions can be performed. I also cannot make the Ubuntu (now ext4) partition any larger since it apparently would encroach on the old NTFS partition.
I burned a Live GParted CD but that puppy is far above my pay grade. I could not understand some of the choices it was asking me to make and was uncertain whether it understood that I want to make changes on drive B, but do nothing to Drive A, which is working fine . There is no data to be saved on (B), but everything to be careful of on (A).
My worst mistake was eliminating Windows from this computer before dealing with the Windows partition. If I can't come up with a better solution, I suppose I can pull the HD from this computer and hook it up to a Windows computer to rid myself of the NTFS partition. But any other suggestions will be welcomed and appreciated.
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