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I installed Ubuntu 16.04 a while ago (that was a scary thing to do) alongside Win10 in dual-boot mode and really started to like it. Thus, I decided to install more stuff on it and, accordingly, uninstall stuff from Win10. When installing Ubuntu, I allocated it, it seems, too little space. I did a little research on it and found I could probably tackle my problem with GParted, as a bunch of people described it as being really easy to use. Let's first see what the partitioning looks like right now and I will tell you what I want to do next.

Current Partitioning

As you can see in the screenshot, compared to examples on dedoimedo, several youtube video tutorials on GParted and further websites, it's a mess. So, as far as I understood, sda4 is the partition left for MS Windows, sda9 is my linux boot partition, or root, and I can't and shouldn't do anything with it as long as I'm using linux and sda7 is my data partition under linux, which is almost full.

What I want to do is re-allocate a portion of sda4 to sda7. How do I do that?

As I'm really new to this, even though it seemed an easy task at first, the more I read about what I shouldn't do, the scarier it becomes, so I haven't touched any of it, yet. Can I just resize sda4 under linux, restart in Windows, open some partition manager under Windows, move sda9, 10, 5, and 6 (whatever sda5 and 6 are, I don't know), and then increase sda7? I read that Windows doesn't see linux partitions, so that actually seems like the wrong path to go.

Can I use any portion of the answer to this question?: Allocate memory from Windows to Linux partition

Also, I seem to only have primary partitions and no extended partition. I don't know exactly what that means, but it seemed to be easier to move around secondary partitions inside an extended partition.

Could I maybe shrink sda4 to have more than 23.87 GiB unallocated space, copy sda7 to that space, delete the old sda7, move sda9, 10, 5, and 6, and allocate the free space to the new sda7 (not all of it, since I still need some space for Win10)?

If any of the above doesn't make any sense at all, you are free to either completely ignore the unsensical portion or explaining why that that is utter rubbish. I'm happy with both.

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    Windows & NTFS need about 30% free to work well. Otherwise when it gets to about 10% free there is so little working room defrag can take forever. Only use Windows to shrink NTFS system partitions and reboot immediately so it can run chkdsk to update to its new size. Use gparted for all LInux partition changes. If moving partitions make sure you have good backups. Any interruption will corrupt system. Can you split your data partition and just add another data partition after sda4? I used to have ext4 & NTFS data partitions. You probably should houseclean as much as possible first.
    – oldfred
    Nov 22, 2016 at 18:27
  • It seems that you have too much stuff on one disk. So I think the best bet is to buy another disk (maybe external) and move all linux stuff into it and leave all windows stuff to the old disk. And remember to create backups of your personal stuff first! Nov 22, 2016 at 22:07
  • @oldfred the goal would be to reduce the Windows partition to about 55 GB. I'm running cleaning programs on my windows partition. I'll try just adding an ext4 partition after sda4 and see how two data partitions work for me.
    – thymaro
    Nov 26, 2016 at 10:01

1 Answer 1

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You can, but this partition edit will take a long time as it requires the partitions to be copied.

I would definitely make a backup before doing this. There's always a possibility of data loss when performing partition edits.

  1. Shrink the NTFS partition by the desired size under Windows disk management
  2. Under gparted, move all the partitions in between the sda4 and sda7 (sda9, 10, 5, 6) as far to the left in the new unallocated space.
  3. Move sda7 as far to the left
  4. Increase sda7 to fill the space to the right

Again, this operation will take a long time in gparted because it involves copying the entire partition back.

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  • thanks for the suggestion, but sda9 will not be moved by gparted, because it is the system partition under linux and thus is mounted and in use, unfortunately.
    – thymaro
    Nov 26, 2016 at 10:03
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    @thymaro This has to be done on a liveUSB so that sda9 will not be mounted
    – Evan Chen
    Nov 26, 2016 at 13:24

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