How to edit size of partitions?

[mattdee132]

When I installed Ubuntu, I dual booted with Windows, but now I want to get rid of my Windows partition and only use Ubuntu. There are no important files on the Windows partition, so I am just looking to delete it and then expand the Ubuntu partition to fill that space. How does one go about doing that?

my hard drive looks like this:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda3 1918 26023 193623018 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda4 26023 38914 103546881 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 26023 38658 101490688 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 38658 38914 2055168 82 Linux swap / Solaris

[frankbooth]

You'll find a detailed guide on how to resize partitions here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Ho...izingPartition

If there's something you don't understand or if you need further help, just ask .

REMEMBER! BE CAREFUL WHEN PARTITIONING!

[Kira_Belka]

When I installed Ubuntu, I dual booted with Windows, but now I want to get rid of my Windows partition and only use Ubuntu. There are no important files on the Windows partition, so I am just looking to delete it and then expand the Ubuntu partition to fill that space. How does one go about doing that?

my hard drive looks like this:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda3 1918 26023 193623018 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda4 26023 38914 103546881 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 26023 38658 101490688 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 38658 38914 2055168 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Hi.. if you 'll no sure in your possibilities .. just use any Ubuntu Live CD and gparted.. so it's very easy!

[mattdee132]

Hi.. if you 'll no sure in your possibilities .. just use any Ubuntu Live CD and gparted.. so it's very easy!

Just looked that up and it doesnt seem to hard. Is there any danger in resizing/moving the partition that it boots from (the main one)?

[Quackers]

There is always a small risk when moving a boot partition (as gparted will tell you if you try it). I have done it many times without a problem, but I've also had to re-install grub when things didn't go quite as planned. It's usually fixable even when things go slightly wrong, but there is a risk.
Backup everything you need before you try it!

[egalvan]

The easiest way to use the space that XP was on...


boot from a LiveCD,
run gedit.
make sure the ntfs drive is un-mounted.
tell gedit to format it as ext4 (or whatever Linux fs you like)
re-boot from your hd,
and use the new space as storage...

No need to move, re-size, re-store, re-install grub, "grub-update", etc...

you can even do this from a running system,
as (obviously) Linux does not depend on any NTFS drive.
unless you have it set up to auto-mount it,
in which case, just un-mount it... then proceed.


One thing to realize is that your NTFS partition is the only PRIMARY partition...
your Ubuntu is fully inside an EXTENDED partition.
this makes it a multi-step process to "grow" your Ubuntu into that space...

using it as a separate storage drive is much easier.

[mattdee132]

wow, thanks. Egalvan's idea worked very quickly and was super easy and seems to work just fine. much safer than bothering with all that other stuff. Just one last question: how do you set a drive to automount?

[egalvan]

wow, thanks. Egalvan's idea worked very quickly and was super easy and seems to work just fine. much safer than bothering with all that other stuff.

I was born lazy, so I always look for the most efficient way of doing things.
And lets face it, NOT doing something is the epitome of efficiency

Just one last question: how do you set a drive to automount?

post a copy of your fstab file...
that will let us see how it's mounting currently.

[egalvan]

Also, bohdi has an excellent tutorial on fstab

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=283131

[karlson]

When I installed Ubuntu, I dual booted with Windows, but now I want to get rid of my Windows partition and only use Ubuntu. There are no important files on the Windows partition, so I am just looking to delete it and then expand the Ubuntu partition to fill that space. How does one go about doing that?

my hard drive looks like this:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda3 1918 26023 193623018 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda4 26023 38914 103546881 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 26023 38658 101490688 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 38658 38914 2055168 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Looking through the partition table I don't think you will be able to.

Reason being is that your NTFS partition is a primary partition and your Linux is located on the extended partitions, which will present a problem since you will need to basically not grow your extended partition, but actually move the partitions over. Merging partitions into an extended one also won't work since at least one partition in the DOS table needs to be primary.

So your simplest solution would be to just create a filesystem on the existing NTFS partition and just mount it under Linux.