Warning: Moving a Partition Might Cause Your OS to Fail to Boot – Dual-Boot and GParted

dual-bootgpartedpartitioning

16.04 is installed alongside Windows. I will free space for 16.04 by shrinking the Windows partition. I understand that it is necessary to boot from a CD \ USB and use a tool like partimage to reallocate disk space.

When resizing the 16.04 partition gParted provided a warning:

Moving a partition might cause your operating system to fail to boot

  • What can be done before reallocating diskspace (via Gparted) to prevent boot failure?
  • After resizing, what tasks must be performed to configure 16.04 to use the added diskspace?

EPILOGUE

Results include 16.04 indicating in the file manager that there is now 25GB (previously 13GB).

More information on the original state is documented (click here)

The Windows partition was shrunk with the diskmgmt.msc console.. gParted was used to resize (expand) the Ubuntu partition: originally 13GB.

$ sudo fdisk -l

Device     Boot     Start       End   Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sda1  *         2048   1026047   1024000   500M  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2         1026048 381746822 380720775 181.6G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3       467251200 468858879   1607680   785M 27 Hidden NTFS WinRE
/dev/sda4       381747200 467251199  85504000  40.8G  5 Extended
/dev/sda5       381749248 433881087  52131840  24.9G 83 Linux
/dev/sda6       433883136 467251199  33368064  15.9G 82 Linux swap / Solaris

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A successful chkdsk was performed on Windows and indicated "no problems found and no futher action required"

Best Answer

Short answers:

  • nothing
  • none

gparted message is misleading as it pertains only for OS booted with lilo, which is not used anymore on modern linux distro where Grub 2 is used most of the time.

So you have nothing to do before reallocating disk space. And ubuntu will automatically used the space added during that process. So again nothing to do there.

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