Gparted

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Running Ubuntu from external HDD.  My PC internal HDD is unmounted.  Here are the sectors I am trying to adjust:

OS: SDA3 144 GB

unallocated space 80 GB

284 GB SDA4

New volume: SDA5 214 GB

I created the 80 GB of free space from SDA3 as I was planning to use it to make a dual boot Windows/Linux system.  I had to abandon that idea and went with the external HDD.

The free space lies between SDA3 and SDA5.  The combination of free space and SDA5 is SDA4.  I have a backup of SDA4.

All attempts to resize SDA4 so that it takes up all 80GB of the free space fail.  Any other way to do this?

I try to keep my OS (Windows) as lean as possible so any programs I can install on SDA5, I do so.

Do I need to delete SDA5 and make SDA4 all unallocated and then recreate the partition and restore the backup?  Is there another way to do what I originally wanted to do?  Will all of my shortcuts from Windows that access SDA5 still work if I have to go the deletion/recreation route?

Thanks

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Larry B wrote:

All attempts to resize SDA4 so that it takes up all 80GB of the free space fail. Any other way to do this?

Actually, sda4 already does include all that. It’s just, the “Extended” partition isn’t a directly usable partition, it’s a container for “Logical” partitions…

You should be able to extend sda5 to encompass all of sda4, or create sda6 in that free space. (In the latter case you’d have a sda6 on disk before sda5…)

This is a consequence of the limitations of the old MBR partitioning scheme …

I suppose Gparted could be a bit clearer about there being no unallocated top-level space on the disk, merely unallocated space within an extended partition.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Ascaris

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“You should be able to extend sda5 to encompass all of sda4”

I can guarantee that does not work.  I get an error every time I have tried it.

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… right, might need to use a Windows-based tool to do this.

At a minimum Gparted will need additional software to handle things at all, your Ubuntu livemedia might not have those (or new enough versions).

Depending on technical specifics, might even need to use a different specialized tool.

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You can only have 4 primary partitions, so get rid on sda4 and 5 and create a new single primary partition using all the space.
This assumes you can afford to delete sda5. If not, backup to external and restore afterwards.

cheers, Paul

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You can only have 4 primary partitions, so get rid on sda4 and 5 and create a new single primary partition using all the space.
This assumes you can afford to delete sda5. If not, backup to external and restore afterwards.

cheers, Paul

Kind of what I originally suggested as an alternative.  I do believe SDA4 is a logical partition.  The error log says to check drive SDA5 for errors, so that is what I will do next time I am in Windows.

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Well, fixing the drive errors allowed Gparted to run and it completed the process.  Took over 90 minutes.  When I booted into Windows, the new drive size was not listed, just the old size.  Also a lot of things do not work like they did.  Getting ready to do some image restoring.  Had I known that this can of worms would open, I would not have bothered.

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Late to this thread, but the advice always given by those of us who have experience with doing Windows-Linux dual-boots is this:

Install Windows FIRST, then Linux. This can help with the partitioning issues which can result if you try to use gParted to create partitions, then install Windows into a partition created by gParted. Especially if gParted was used to create an Extended Partition, and Windows is being installed into that Extended Partition.

Also, if you install Linux first and then try to install Windows, Grub will then often fail to find the Linux bootloader. Doing things the other way around, Grub usually will find the Windows bootloader.

Personally, I would not put a Linux-formatted partition between two Windows-formatted partitions.  I would have Windows be Partitions sda1-sda5, and put the free space after sda5 to create sda6 for Linux. gParted is capable of doing this within the Extended Partition sda4.

-- rc primak

2 users thanked author for this post.

Ascaris, Elly

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rc primak wrote:

Personally, I would not put a Linux-formatted partition between two Windows-formatted partitions. I would have Windows be Partitions sda1-sda5, and put the free space after sda5 to create sda6 for Linux. gParted is capable of doing this within the Extended Partition sda4.

There’s no technical reason not to put a Linux partition between Windows partitions, though I understand it is your preference.  My normal schema when  I ran full dual-boot setups (those that I actually expected to use with both OSes) was to have the ESP (on my EFI systems), then MS reserved, then Windows (boot/system), then Linux (root), then the Linux swap partition, then the Windows NTFS data partition, then Linux /home.  I would use the NTFS data partition from within Linux too.

The gist of it is that the system stuff goes at the front, and the data in the back.  Back when I used hard drives, the stuff closer to the front of the drive was read/written faster, and it makes logical sense to me to group OSes at the front and data in the back rather than grouping by filesystem type.  Windows got the first partition because it was, as you said, installed first.  Linux respectfully leaves Windows be and sets itself up in such a way to ask you which you want to use at boot time, of course, while Windows just stomps all over everything else and refuses to recognize that non-Windows OSes even exist.

One thing that is not an issue on MBR systems is the requirement that a bootable partition be primary and marked active.  That’s a Windows thing, even though I have seen many people authoritatively state that this is the way it is without any reference to the OS in question.  There are a lot of things like that.

Just the other day, someone here said that a GPT disk must have at least two partitions, one of them being the ESR (/efi), and that it is impossible to delete the ESR from a partition editor.  Neither is true; I have a SSD in my PC now that is GPT and has only one partition, and no ESR, and I got there by deleting the ESR that used to be there with Gparted or KDE Partition Manager (not sure which I used, but they’re very similar, and are both frontends for the same program that does the actual work).

Some other supposedly impossible things that Linux can do include performing an EFI boot from a MBR partitioned disk, and it can even boot from a GPT disk on a BIOS PC (using a small MBR bootloader that chainloads the GPT loader, I think).  The 32-bit Linux can do all of this just as effectively as the 64-bit.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/16GB & GTX1660ti, KDE Neon
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, KDE Neon (and Win 11 for maintenance)

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Ascaris wrote:

Some other supposedly impossible things that Linux can do include performing an EFI boot from a MBR partitioned disk, and it can even boot from a GPT disk on a BIOS PC (using a small MBR bootloader that chainloads the GPT loader, I think). The 32-bit Linux can do all of this just as effectively as the 64-bit.

Exactly… in the general case.

… though, these really depend on having “normal” firmware (EFI or BIOS). Seen some firmware that’d throw a hissy fit if the disk was partitioned “wrong”… certain manufacturers have a tradition of making these, remember the models that required an OEM-tweaked version of MS-DOS way back when?

So yeah. If it requires hardware-specific custom install media just to reinstall whatever it was sold with…

And if it was just Linux, you might not even need to use partitions at all. That’s the one thing (U)EFI just won’t do, but in legacy boot mode it does apparently work on certain motherboards, BIOS / firmware dependent.

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