Need partitioning help.

[hiloguy]

I finally managed to do a fresh install of 18.04 on the second HDD in my laptop, but I assumed the install would delete all the old partitions as it installed. I went with regular install; not "something other." Now I have this:
Screenshot from 2018-10-06 12-44-26.jpg
The "key" symbols also appear in the same places when I opened GParted from a live-usb boot. It said a portion of those partitions are in use.

Is there any way I can move the HOME folder into the unused 400 Gb partition? Failing that, can I somehow delete the partitions and just utilize the whole 500 Gb drive as if I had formatted it before the install? Or any other suggestions other than starting from scratch with another fresh install? I've spent a long time installing and configuring this install and would love to be able to keep it!

Thank you!

[ajgreeny]

You have many partitions for your Ubuntu install as logical partitions sitting inside an extended partition, /dev/sdb2, including a swap partition.

That swap will be found and used automatically even by a live system so to make any changes you will have to turn swap off by right clicking in gparted on /dev/sdb6 and choosing swapoff. You may also need to right click on all other partitions with the key icon showing, one by one, and chose unmount. Once all are unmounted you should be able to work on them.

However, you do not give us many details of exactly what you want; the only partition of 400GB is that extended partition sdb2, which could be made larger by the 37.25GB of unallocated space between sdb1 and sdb2. I assume that your /home is currently a folder in the root partition, not a separate partition, so we would have to find a way to copy all your current home data files to the new /home partition which could be difficult unless you can copy all of home to an external backup (which you should do regularly).

An old thread about doing this is at https://askubuntu.com/questions/6434...under-single-p
and a community help page at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Pa...ng/Home/Moving

What is actually on that large sdb5 partition at present; is it just data files which would normally be within your /home anyway as that might make the job a bit easier?

[Dennis N]

I don't see the unused partition. Of the ext4 partitions, your root file system is on sdb7 and something is using 231 GiB of sdb5.

[hiloguy]

OK< what I started out to do was to do a simple, "regular" clean install of 18.04 on my 500 Gb HDD (in the optical drive adapter). I assumed using the regular (as opposed to "something esle" install, the HDD would be formatted in the process and all the old partitions deleted. Not! So what I want at this point is to just get back to simple, if that's possible from here. You asked what was on that 400 GB partition, How do I see what is actually on each of those partitions? The only reason I knew something was amiss was when I was loading my photo files back into "Pictures" and was told, "not enough room." So evidently the entire OS loaded into one of the tiny partitions? I don't know how to show what is in each of the partitions.

So . . . can I simply delete any of the existing partitions that are empty? I would be happy to delete all my personal files, as they are easy to reinstall from my backup drive. I would prefer to not have to reinstall Ubuntu since I spent a long time configuring everything the way I want it. It was all working sweetly until I got that "not enough room" message!

If I can delete partitions and just let Ubuntu use up all the space it wants like a regular basic install, How do I see what's in each partition so I delete only my data and photo folders?

[hiloguy]

Another option here to keep things simple for this many-year Ubuntu user who still has trouble with the inner workings: As much as I don't want to have to spend the time necessary to reconfigure another fresh install of 18.04, I'm willing to do it if I have to. To that end, I need to know this: If I format the second HDD in my optical drive bay for the exclusive use of 18.04, how do I make sure that it gets installed on that HDD in the install process? I don't really care about assigning special partitions, as I've always had good luck letting Ubuntu install itself without entering "something else." I just need to know that I'm not going to jeopardize the 125 Gb SSD that W7 is on.

Thank you!!!

[Dennis N]

I think your entire Ubuntu install is on /dev/sdb7. It is a reasonable size: 40 GiB. I regularly do installs with 20-25 GiB, but I also have a data partition to store big groups of files such as my music files and my camera images. This relieves the space demands on the partition I installed Ubuntu on.

I mount the data partition at startup by putting a line to do it in the file /etc/fstab, which specifies file systems and partitions to be mounted when I boot the system.

After setting up the data partition, I can access it from the file manager - to make it quicker, I bookmark commonly used folders in the data partition (camera, music, etc).

If sdb5 on your picture is available (right now it shows 231 GiB in use) it would make a good data partition. It would be simple to set up if that stuff on there is expendable.

(comment: not really important, but I also don't see what sdb1 is doing - probably nothing since its not mounted according to the screenshot. Could be an artifact of previous install?).

[hiloguy]

Thank you for your reply! So how can I see what files are now in the various partitions? What I think would solve my problem is if I could simply move my Home folder into that empty 400 GB partition. But how do I do that?

You asked what is is in sdb1; that's the main 125 Gb SSD that has W7 on it for those few times when I need W7, like for udating a GPS, etc. The 500 Gb drive installed in an optical-bay adapter is exclusively for 18.04.

So can you walk me through moving my Home folder into sdb2, the empty (I think) 427 Gb partition?

[Yellow Pasque]

Thank you for your reply! So how can I see what files are now in the various partitions?

They look like unencrypted ext4 partitions, so you should be able to easily mount them (using file manager or command line or whatever you like) and look.

You asked what is is in sdb1; that's the main 125 Gb SSD

No, that would be a different disk (not sdb). Look at the picture. sdb1 is the first partition (only 1GB large). It's almost certainly a leftover separate /boot partition from the previous install.

So can you walk me through moving my Home folder into sdb2, the empty (I think) 427 Gb partition?

It's not empty. Look at the picture (231GB used). You probably already have your photos and other media loaded in there. You may not have to move the entire home folder. You can just create a symlink(s) to the various things in there. I keep my music/vids in folders in a separate large data partition and make symlinks. That way I don't need to have a separate /home partition and I can access the data from other Linux installs.

[ajgreeny]

Thank you for your reply! So how can I see what files are now in the various partitions? What I think would solve my problem is if I could simply move my Home folder into that empty 400 GB partition. But how do I do that?

You asked what is is in sdb1; that's the main 125 Gb SSD that has W7 on it for those few times when I need W7, like for udating a GPS, etc. The 500 Gb drive installed in an optical-bay adapter is exclusively for 18.04.

So can you walk me through moving my Home folder into sdb2, the empty (I think) 427 Gb partition?

You do not have an empty 427GB partition; that is the extended partition that contains the other partitions so it is like a wrapper round all the others; see my comments in post #2.

It may be possible to put your home onto the 372GB sdb5 but that is already about two thirds used so we really need to know what is there; is it your data files for Ubuntu? It is certainly nothing to do with Windows as it is an ext4 partition, not readable by Windows so all those 231GB are from your Ubuntu.
It may help us if you could still boot to this Ubuntu install and from there run terminal commands

df =hT
sudo parted -l
mount

one by one and show us the output of each here.

Please use Code-Tags for terminal output. See my signature below for a How-to

[hiloguy]

Well, I REALLY appreciate all the assistance from everyone in this thread, but for me the fixes just kept getting more and more complicated. So I did what I probably should have done as soon as I realized that I had tried to install 18.04 onto a HDD that had been partitioned for a previous install. I kinda figured (hoped?) that Ubuntu would install into the old partitions, using them the way 14.04 had done. Not happening, so the whole new install went into a tiny partition and then when I started loading my files from backup, I got the "not enough room" message.

So last night, I deleted all of the partitions on my second HDD (W7 in on the main 125Gb SSD) and started over with another clean install letting Ubuntu use the whole drive. Maybe one day when I feel brave enough to deal with it, I'll try moving my Home folder into a separate partition. But for now, everything is working sweetly. Both OS's boot properly, and I really like 18.04.

Thanks again, everyone!