Altering partitions of hard drive

Question

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit. I need more disk space and my current configuration is as follows:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/loop0       17G   17G  6.1M 100% /

udev            1.9G  4.0K  1.9G   1% /dev

tmpfs           773M  860K  772M   1% /run

none            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock

none            1.9G  364K  1.9G   1% /run/shm

/dev/sda3       284G  108G  176G  38% /host

overflow        1.0M   40K  984K   4% /tmp

The size of the Windows partition /dev/sda3 is way more than I need. I'd like to free up about 100-125 GB and move it to the Ubuntu partition /dev/loop0. I expect to be working with databases around 25 GB in size and want to have room to grow.

Are the instructions here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ResizeandDuplicateWubiDisk the most appropriate ones to use?

Is there a compelling reason for me to consider using a different form of Ubuntu installation?

Answer 1

You can use Gparted to accomplish your task.

This article shows how you can modify the partitioning of your Linux system with GParted (Gnome Partition Editor) without losing data. This includes resizing partitions (enlarging and shrinking), moving partitions on the hard drive, creating and deleting partitions, and even modifying filesystem types. GParted is a free partition editor available as a desktop program and also as a Live-CD. It supports the following filesystems: ext2, ext3, fat16, fat32, hfs, hfs+, jfs, linux-swap, reiserfs, reiser4, ufs, xfs, and even ntfs (Windows). Have alook at this

^{Source: howtoforge}

If you don't have Gparted instaaled, you can install it

Just press Ctrl+Alt+T on your keyboard to open Terminal. When it opens, run the command below.

sudo apt-get install gparted

Or