Ubuntu – How to merge an unallocated partition with an extended partition

gpartedpartitioning

How can I merge an unallocated partition with an extended partition ?
I'm having trouble moving this unallocated space to the Linux portion.

Here is my partition space:

a busy cat
(source: axgig.com)

Best Answer

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 screenshot gparted
  • now you can drag the left arrow as far as you want to increase the partition
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