How to increase size of root partition when not in order with home?

Question

I am unsure whether how to increase the size of my root partition. The following is a screenshot from gparted.

As you can see that I need to extend my root partition.

My thinking of the steps that need to be involved are:-

1. After booting into live environment start gparted and turn swap-off.
2. Delete swap /dev/sda5.
3. Extend root(/dev/sda3) to the right.
4. Reduce size of /home from the left.
5. Increase the size of root partition to the right.
6. Reduce size of home partition from the right.
7. Format the newly created unallocated space as SWAP.
8. Turn Swap on.

Is my thinking process correct in this case? I was also wondering whether I need to input any commands like mount or so into the terminal? If so, do these commands have to be entered in the live environment or after I have booted?

Answer 1

You are pretty near to the correct way, but you are missing important steps, also there is no need to resize partitions twice.

1. Backup any important data which may exist in your /home-partition.
2. Boot into live environment start gparted and turn swap-off.
3. Reduce the size of the /home-partition sda6 from the left by about 15GB.
4. Move the swap-partition sda5 to the right.
5. Reduce the size of the extended partition sda4 from the left.
6. Increase the size of the /-partition sda3 to the right.

The extended partition sda4 is a container for logical partitions (in your case this are the swap-partition and the home-partition). Your /-partition is a primary partition and can't use any space inside the extended partition, that's why you have to reduce the size of the extended partition too as described in step 5.

If you use a laptop, make sure your power supply is connected, you don't want to run out of battery while performing these steps!

And no, you don't need to mount any partitions while performing these steps, you can not edit a mounted partition, a mounted partition would be automatically locked.