Ubuntu

Moving unallocated space from extended to primary partition

Asked by mrbeardy

Bought a new Toshiba laptop with Vista and installed Hardy on it as a duel boot. Both VIsta and Hardy work fine except for the Hardy installation shrunk the Vista primary partition so it has no spare room to actually do anything.

See here to see the drive as it stands (screenshot.png link at bottom):

http://cl1p.net/hiandrew/

As you can see I need to move the unallocated amount in the extended partition to make it available to the Vista partition.

So far, using Gparted from a live cd the following HAS NOT worked:

- Selecting the boundary of of the extended partition to shrink, grow it. Greyed out.
- Deleting the unallocated space. Greyed out.
- Growing the Visa partition into the extended partition's unallocated space (eats up the sliver of unallocated space on its right ok).

If I format it FAT32 (NTFS is greyed) then in Vista (and I know this isn't a Vista support forum) it won't recognize the unallocated space if I try an map it as it says there is not enough space to carry out the process.

Ideas? Thanks.

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Bhavani Shankar (bhavi) said : 		#1

Hello:

you could try making an ext3 of the unallocated space and copying sda1 to it, then making sure you've got a working copy (need to edit /etc/boot/menu.lst on the old sda1 to point to the kernel on the new disk and /etc/fstab on the new disk to point / to the new disk) and then removing the old sda1 and then trying to resize the new partition containing sda1. This potentially could get very ugly.....

This article might help you out:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=181285

Regards

Bhavani Shankar.

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Jagtar Singh Hunjan (jagga99) said : 		#2

Probably use live gparted cd, very easy to shrink and manage partitions

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Alfredzo Nash (lfrdznash) said : 		#3

i believe i am having a similar problem.
I have hardy and vista dual-booted
i wanted to merge my unallocated space, and i unmounted my ntfs using Gparted( i really dont know why i did)
I can boot into my Vista partition now. is there anything i can do?

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Alfredzo Nash (lfrdznash) said : 		#4

Ok i used the G parted live CD, and i cant restore the old ntfs.
all hope is lost :-(

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Alfredzo Nash (lfrdznash) said : 		#5

Old News . I had to re-install

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