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I installed Ubuntu with 10GB of space, hoping it'd be sufficient. Needless to say, 3 months later I am out of room. I'd prefer just to extend my Ubuntu partition, but I'm already out of room on my HDD. However, I have a little less than 30GB of free space on my Windows C drive, so I was thinking I'd shrink the C drive first and then use the newly freed up space to extend the Ubuntu partition.

I tried to shrink the Windows partition in the Disk Management tool, but it wouldn't allow me to shrink it any more than 500MB. Does anyone know if this has anything to do with it being a primary partition and/or if I was trying to shrink while I was already booted into Windows? If being booted into Windows is the issue, then how'd I do it using the Disk Management tool to begin with?

I should add that I've already done a full, system image backup of my Windows. I have 3 primary partitions that are all Windows (2 of which are from Dell that I want to avoid touching). My Ubuntu install is in an extended partition, with one root partition and another for swap space.

My bigger question is if I have anything to be concerned of with this shrink/extend idea. The C drive and the Ubuntu root partition are directly adjacent to each other. Since I was having trouble with the Windows Disk Management, I was going to do everything in GParted Live. Any advice or comments would be greatly appreciated.

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  • I think the following thread askubuntu.com/questions/58529/… may get you with some idea.
    – BDRSuite
    Jun 30, 2015 at 19:22
  • can you give details about you HDD partition. Jun 30, 2015 at 19:35
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    Did you defragment the Windows drive before attempting to shrink it from Windows? I would suggest trying that before using gparted on it. Jun 30, 2015 at 19:36
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    Sure thing, what sort of details are you interested in? And I haven't attempted to defrag the Windows C drive. It never saves that much space once its done and it can take a long time to complete. However, I think you're right, it's a good idea just to ensure the safety of the data.
    – coolDude
    Jun 30, 2015 at 19:55

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Disk Management has some restrictions. You can only shrink a partition or volume up to half of its free space, and you can only extend a partition having contiguous unallocated space to the right of it. Disk management cannot extend a basic partition using an unallocated space to its left. You can use a third party disk manager software, such as aomei partition assistant, to resize partition.

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