GParted – How to Merge Two Partitions Using GParted

You must run gparted from a livecd because you will be moving the partitions.

1. Backup your data (there is an high risk if something goes wrong during partition changes)
2. Move sda3 to the beginning of the unallocated space

3. Move sda4 to the beginning of the unallocated space

4. Resize sda4

You can move partitions with gparted. Start my moving the swap partition to the end of the drive. Select the parition and click the resize/move button. You can drag it to the end. Click apply to see it happen. This one should be pretty fast.

The moving of the other partitions will take a really long time as it has to move every piece of data in the partition. I would have a play with moving and resizing without hitting apply to figure out what you want to do. Then when you have the plan written down, perform each action one at a time.

Something like:

1. Move swap
2. grow sda3 to x (this will fast as it is just adding empty spave on the end)
3. move sda3 (this will take a long time)
4. grow sda2 to y
5. move sda2
6. grow sda1 to the rest

As you can see you should to grow a partition before you move it as that will make it a lot easier to line up the new partitions.