How to manage hard drive partition?

Question

I do have many blank partition in my hard drive which I want to combine to make a single large partition and also make if NTFS. Please tell me the procedure..and I also have a "extended" partition..don't know what it means..but I also want to make that partition as NTFS..please help me!

Answer 1

Partitions contain File Systems. There are many operations that you can do on these partitions. I recommend you have a look at gparted.

sudo apt-get install gparted
gparted

The exteneded partition is just a particular kind of container which can contain more partitions. In early partition table schemes, there was only room for 4 partitions. The need to have more caused an evolution to making one of these an "extended" partition which contains more partitions. With newer partitioning schemes (gpt) this limitation is overcome.

However, what you propose, to fuse the contents of different partitions into a single partition is difficult to do and depends on what kind of file systems these partitions hold. If they are different kinds of file systems (for example ext4 and FAT32), it's simply not practical to fuse them together.

Your best bet would be to buy a new hard drive, large enough to hold the contents of all the file systems on the old drive. Then create one large partition on the new drive, format it with your chosen file system (ext4, btrfs, etc.) and then copy the entire contents of the older drive's file systems.

Answer 2

Be very careful of what you are doing! you might end up erasing critical partitions on your disk.

Now remember that only contiguous spaces on your disk can be clubbed together to form a partition.

Each disk can have up to four primary partitions OR three primary partitions and an extended partition. If you need four partitions or less, you can just create them as primary partitions. Lets say you need 5 partitions, then you make 3 primary and 1 extended and then 2 logical partitions inside the extended partition. (the Extended partition serves as a container for multiple logical paritions)

On Ubuntu you can use the GParted tool

http://gparted.org/download.php

or on a command line

sudo apt-get install gparted
gksudo gparted

Now coming to the last part of the question :

To fuse together partitions, you will have to deleted them and then make a new partition out of the available space. Remember the deleting partitions will erase all data on them and to make a new bigger partition all the newly vacant memory spaces should be contiguous