How can I expand/resize my extended partition (sda3) with unallocated free space to the left of it? I want this to be able to expand my / partition (sda5).
Ubuntu – How to Expand , Resize “extended partition”?
gpartedpartitioning
Related Solutions
It is likely that the extended partition is locked because your LiveCD environment is swapping to the swap partition which is inside of the extended partition.
Right-click on the swap partition and select "Swap off"
Free space must be adjacent to a partition to make increasing the size of that partition possible.
You can use gparted running from a Live CD to move that 268GB partition (mysteriously called "C") to the front of the free space. Then you can increase the size of the extended partition.
If you get an error from gparted during the resize process (it boils doen to partitions cannot overlap) then you've hit a bug in the gparted version shipped with Ubuntu 12.10 (it is 0.12.1).
- Download the latest version of Gparted Live
- burn that to a CD
- boot your Computer from that CD (you have to answer a few uncritical questions here)
- the last question allows you to "autostart gparted", which is what you want
- now select the drive you need and there the extended partition (easiest done in the table)
- right click on that line and select "resize/move" to get the following
- now you can drag the left arrow as far as you want to increase the partition
Best Answer
You only can resize (except expanding by moving the right border; depending on the file system) partitions that are unmounted.
Every partition that is in use by your system is mounted. You can see it in gParted when there is this key symbol right to the partition name.
So you have to unmount the partitions inside the extended partition (sda5, sda6, sda7) and then the extended partition (sda3) itself. This is done by selecting "unmount" in the context menu of the partition in gParted.
But stop! Ubuntu will not allow you to unmount the partitions it is running from. Therefore, you have to boot your PC from a live medium (e.g. Ubuntu installation DVD) and run gParted inside this live sessions, where no hard disk partitions are mounted.
Note that partitioning is always dangerous and can lead to data loss or errors at boot time. So make sure your backups are valid and up to date!