Quick question about gparted

[poldie]

Hm. To enlarge sda5, you must first enlarge sda3, the extended partition that contains sda5. That's a little tricky since you have to click on the thin colored border that encloses both sda5 and sda6.

An easier way to select sda3 is to click on the words in the text area below the graphics. Click on the line that says the Filesystem is "extended".

Then click on the Resize/Move button. Now it should allow you to enlarge the extended partition.

After you enlarge the extended partition (sda3),
you should be able to enlarge the logical partition (sda5).

I've booted from my USB key again, so the hard drive is probably not being used at all (other than that I'm using gparted to look at it).

I can see what you mean about clicking on sd3 (the outer dashed line) or sda5 (the inner one) but only on sda5 does the resize option appear, and I can't exceed its current size.

Meanwhile, an `unallocated 16.51GiB` is staying on the left of the sda5 in the bar chart (and at the top of the grid of text below), apparently preventing me from using the space. I can click 'new' on it, which then offers me a few options. "Create as" is limited to `primary partition`, I have a choice of a few file systems, free space preceding/following, and new size. Perhaps I have to do something with this before I can use its space. Initially, like I said, it held the Linus OS (back when I only had, I think, one partition - at least, it had whatever the Aspire One came with). I think it was in ext2 format.

I'm wondering if when I installed Ubuntu it created the extended partition for itself, and now there's no way of using the space left behind from the initial primary partition.

[unutbu]

Hm, poldie, you have me stumped.
I can't think of any reason why you should not be able to resize the extended partition.

I'm wondering if when I installed Ubuntu it created the extended partition for itself, and now there's no way of using the space left behind from the initial primary partition.

As far as I know this should not stop GParted from resizing the Ubuntu partition.

I'll continue to think about this, but at the moment I'm out of ideas.

Edit: Well, okay, here is something of an idea:

If you have a partimage backup of your sda5 partition, then you can delete the sda5 partition, shrink the sda3 extended partition, and then create a new primary partition in the unallocated space, and then restore sda5 (into the new primary partition) from the partimage backup.

If you choose to take this route, we'll have to reinstall grub (http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...95&postcount=1)
and edit your menu.lst so that it uses the correct UUIDs and (hdX,Y)s to boot Ubuntu.

I suggest you play around with GParted some more, since if you can get it to work that will lead to a much simpler solution.

If you decide to take this alternate route, post that you want to do so and I'll try to write up instructions to make the process as painless as I know how.

[poldie]

Hm, poldie, you have me stumped.
I can't think of any reason why you should not be able to resize the extended partition.



As far as I know this should not stop GParted from resizing the Ubuntu partition.

I'll continue to think about this, but at the moment I'm out of ideas.

Edit: Well, okay, here is something of an idea:

If you have a partimage backup of your sda5 partition, then you can delete the sda5 partition, shrink the sda3 extended partition, and then create a new primary partition in the unallocated space, and then restore sda5 (into the new primary partition) from the partimage backup.

If you choose to take this route, we'll have to reinstall grub (http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...95&postcount=1)
and edit your menu.lst so that it uses the correct UUIDs and (hdX,Y)s to boot Ubuntu.

I suggest you play around with GParted some more, since if you can get it to work that will lead to a much simpler solution.

If you decide to take this alternate route, post that you want to do so and I'll try to write up instructions to make the process as painless as I know how.

Thanks again for the help so far.


I have no backup. I have no practical way of backing up gigs of data at the moment (no usb hard drive, only a 2gb usb key, and I've not got my Acer talking to my desktop pc on a local network yet - they're both on the same router (Acer = wireless, desktop = wired ethernet) but not on the same (or any) network. I'm a bit nervous about playing around with gparted too much without a backup. I think, unless there's some magic wand I can wave which will let me just format the unallocated space and then merge it into the main partition, that perhaps the best option is to wait until the end of the month when Ubuntu 8.10 is out, and then just reformat/repartition the whole drive to be the default Ubuntu design (ie what I have now, less the extra partition). It's not like I have any data to back up - it's just it's taken me a while to install apps, configure the wifi, audio, compiz etc.

I've attached a screenshot of gparted in case my descriptions previously are inadequate.





Which isn't showing up for some reason. The url is:

http://img361.imageshack.us/my.php?image=gp1gr9.jpg

[unutbu]

Hm. Without backups, I think the safest thing to do is not try to resize the Linux partition.

It is safe however to just make a new partition in the unallocated space. You could store data there for example.

If you have say a lot of music files, you mount the data partition at /data, and move your music files to /data/music. If before you had your music at /home/user/music, you could make a symlink from /home/user/music to /data/music:

ln -s /data/music /home/user/music

By doing it this way, you can still read and write to files in /home/user/music, even though they are physically stored in /data/music.

Anyway, just a thought...

[poldie]

Hm. Without backups, I think the safest thing to do is not try to resize the Linux partition.

It is safe however to just make a new partition in the unallocated space. You could store data there for example.

If you have say a lot of music files, you mount the data partition at /data, and move your music files to /data/music. If before you had your music at /home/user/music, you could make a symlink from /home/user/music to /data/music:

ln -s /data/music /home/user/music

By doing it this way, you can still read and write to files in /home/user/music, even though they are physically stored in /data/music.

Anyway, just a thought...

I gave up. Gparted cannot do what I want. I've reinstalled Ubuntu from scratch, forming 1 large 120gb partition in the process. I'm not sure whether there's a bug in gparted or whether there's a limitation on what you can do with linux partitions compared with what you can do on Windows ones (certainly I don't remember similar problems on W2K/XP using Partition Magic).