GParted can't resize logical partitions

Question

I have 6 partitions in total. In order, they are sda1: Windows boot loader. sda2: Windows 7 partition. sda3: Storage partition (ntfs). sda4: Extended partition containing sda5, Ubuntu, and sda6, it's swap.

Take a look here:

I am trying to extend sda4 to grab that last bit of unallocated space. Then, I move the swap to the end of the extended partition and use the free space in the middle of the swap and Ubuntu to extend Ubuntu.

The processes in GParted looks like this:

Grow /dev/sda4 from 46.00 GiB to 66.70 GiB
Move /dev/sda6 to the right and shrink it from 16.00 GiB to 8.00 GiB
Grow /dev/sda5 from 30.00 GiB to 58.70 GiB

However, when I try to perform these operations, it gives me this error:

Unable to satisfy all constraints on the partition

There is little error icon next to sda5:

e2label: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/sda5
Couldn't find valid filesystem superblock

Couldn't find valid filesystem superblock

dumpe2fs 1.42 (29-Nov-2011) directory while trying to open /dev/sda5

Unable to read the contents of this file system!
Because of this some operations may be unavailable.

The cause might be a missing software package.
The following list of software packages is required for ext4 file system support:
e2fsprogs v1.41+.

However, apt-get says that e2fsprogs is already installed.

I am very confused.

Answer 1

Did you save the gparted_details.htm log file when this occurred? If so then it would be very helpful with recovery if you can post the log file.

I suspect that you might have encountered the following bug: Bug 686668 - Growing logical partition overlaps end of extended partition

This problem was fixed in GParted 0.14.1.

You might be able to resolve this problem by using testdisk to read the disk surface to determine the correct partition table boundaries. Make sure that testdisk finds your existing partitions properly before you write any changes to disk.

For future partitioning, I suggest you use the latest version of GParted (currently 0.16.1). One of the easiest ways to do this is with GParted Live written to CD or USB flash drive.