gparted disk partition wont resize

Question

hey im really new to ubuntu but over the past few weeks I have brought some old machines back from the dead by running ubuntu rather than windows and im loving it, even convinced my dad to get rid of winidows 10. So I decided to dual boot my main pc running windows 7 and focal fossa yesterday. left all the partitioning up to ubuntu installer and im already out of space, it gave me 9gb. now im having difficulty booting ubuntu and getting loads of warnings about low disk space.

been in to windows disk manager and unallocated some space, made a bootable gparted usb which i cant get to run keep getting a message saying no bootable partition in table, then remembered i have a bootable usb that i installed ubuntu with(literally hours earlier).

so im on my live usb in gparted, and i cant resize the ubuntu partition, made a bit more unalocated space in gparted but still cant make my ubuntu partition any bigger.

what am i doing wrong? would i be better just reinstalling ubuntu (im 6 hours in and 5 of them have been spent trying to resize a partition)

thanks

Answer 1

Move /dev/sda3 to the left, then you'll be able to resize /dev/sda4.

Answer 2

Make sure that you have a good backup of your important Ubuntu files, as this procedure can corrupt or lose data.

Keep these things in mind:

• always start the entire procedure with issuing a swapoff on any mounted swap partitions, and end the entire procedure with issuing a swapon on that same swap partition

• a move is done by pointing the mouse pointer at the center of a partition and dragging it left/right with the hand cursor

• a resize is done by dragging the left/right side of a partition to the left/right with the directional arrow cursor

• if any partition can't be moved/resized graphically, you may have to manually enter the specific required numeric data (don't do this unless I instruct you to)

• you begin any move/resize by right-clicking on the partition in the lower pane of the main window, and selecting the desired action from the popup menu, then finishing that action in the new move/resize window

Do the following...

Note: if the procedure doesn't work exactly as I outline, STOP immediately and DO NOT continue.

Note: This particular re-partition is slightly complicated because of the extended partition.

Note: If this is a newer UEFI computer, this disk should really be in GPT partition format, not MBR format.

• boot to a Ubuntu Live DVD/USB, in “Try Ubuntu” mode
• start gparted
• move /dev/sda3 partition all the way left
  • reboot now to test if moving this partition caused a problem booting Windows or Ubuntu
  • if it boots ok, then return here and continue
• resize the left side of /dev/sda4 extended partition all the way left
  • this might be tricky as it's an extended partition
  • if you can't do this, stop, and contact me for an alternate procedure
• move /dev/sda5 partition all the way left
• resize the right side of /dev/sda5 all the way right
• click the Apply icon