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This is an image of my partition in Gparted.

picture1

As you can see, it's a dual boot system. Now, I would really like to shrink my Windows partition sda3, and add the space to my Linux partition sda8.

I can shrink to Windows partition without any problems, but I just can't get the Linux partition to take over the unused space.

The problem is that when I shrink my Windows partition, I can't seem to be able to add this space to my Linux partition.

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    Offtopic: I see you have Dell laptop. Do you know about a certificate scam by Dell?
    – Barafu Albino
    Nov 25, 2015 at 11:03
  • Hadn't heard of that one, will sure keep on following the situation!
    – MaPe
    Nov 27, 2015 at 14:00
  • No need following. Just delete those certificates and put a reminder somewhere that if you reinstall Windows from recovery partition, the certificvate would be back again.
    – Barafu Albino
    Nov 29, 2015 at 15:12

4 Answers 4

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You can not edit the partition that you have booted with.
Use Gparted Live CD or simplt your Ubuntu installation medium (it has gparted). Boot from it. Run Gparted. Use GUI to do changes and press the Apply button. Remember, the process of applying can take hours and if you stop it prematurely you will have one of the partitions lost.

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    More generally, you can't edit a mounted partition, and you can't unmount the / partition while Linux is running from it.
    – Zeiss Ikon
    Nov 25, 2015 at 13:21
  • If you want to be precise, you can edit mounted partition. But if something starts to write onto it during process, you get damage. You can remount even / as read-only and edit it with command-line tool. But it is just way more complicated than to use Ubuntu Live session.
    – Barafu Albino
    Nov 25, 2015 at 13:59
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1.Get an USB with ubuntu live session installed and try the whole process again

2.Boot with Windows and download a software called - Partition magic(disk-management doesn't work sometimes) and edit the partitions with it.

Follow one of those steps and you'll definitely solve the problem

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  • Turns out my swap partition was still mounted. After Swapoff, I was able to reassign the space from the ntfs partition. This presented me with a new problem, however. If I want to move to unallocated space to my linux system partition (sda8), Gparted gives me a warning that I might not be able to boot my system after resizing the linux partition How big is this risk, or should I just ignore the warning altogether?
    – MaPe
    Nov 28, 2015 at 11:51
  • If you do it through live cd than there shouldn't be a risk. I've tried it myself,there was no problem occured. Good luck :)
    – SuDo User
    Nov 29, 2015 at 12:29
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As I believe you can not edit mounted partitions so maybe could try running Linux from the live cd and trying it (I am new to Linux do not know if you can install apps while runing the live cd)

I have found this it may be usefull http://gparted.org/livecd.php

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  • Found the answer myself. After repartitioning, Grub will not function as before, so you will have to reconfigure it. A good way of doing this is by using boot-repair. These were the steps I took: 1) create a live ubuntu usb, 2) install boot-repair, 3) repartition using gparted, 4) launch boot-repair to fix grub. After this, I rebooted, and everything worked fine and dandy!
    – MaPe
    Nov 29, 2015 at 12:02
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In Windows, right click on This PC and click manage. Go to disk management. Right click on windows partition and select shrink volume. Select the space you would like to get freed. Then follow the steps till you get free space on your hard disk. Now right click on the Linux partition and select extend volume. Follow the steps and you're done. Backup your important files first. If you can't see your Linux partition on windows. Then use AMOEI Partition Assistant, available as a freeware, to add the free space to your Linux partition. If not, then use the Linux live CD to add the free space to the Linux partition. I'm not sure how that works though. DO MAKE A BACKUP OF IMPORTANT FILES.

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