Resizing parittions with GParted

[EdgarG]

Greetings all,

I'm running a Windows 7 / Ubuntu 9.2 dual boot on an HP laptop. The Ubuntu partition is too big and I'd like to shrink it and enlarge the Windows partition. Using GParted on a Knoppix live CD, I am able to shrink the Ubuntu partition but unable to reallocate the space that is now unallocated to Windows. What to do?

Thanks,
E

[oz]

Hello and welcome to the forums!

What errors are you getting?

What do your partitions look like?

Post the output of fdisk -l here so that other users can see your partition layout and offer some advice, or solutions.

[EdgarG]

Thank you for your reply. I think I understand the problem better now, although I still don't know how to solve it. It seems that there is a 5.5 MB of unallocated space between the W7 and Ubuntu partitions. When I right click on that partition, everything is greyed out except for NEW. When I click NEW, I get an error message saying that there are already four primary partitions. So, it appears that if I can only get rid of that unallocated space or integrate it into some other partition, I will be able to expand the Windows space.


Any suggestions?

(I was going to post a snapshot of the GParted screen with the partitions, but my flash drive just died with the image on it. )

[Charles4809]

I assume that your Win7 partition is the first one on the disk and the Ubuntu ones coming second, third and fourth. And that, for some reason, they are all primary partitions according to your error message.
This means that your disk cannot have more partitions, because the maximum number of primary partitions is four. Another choice would be to have three primary partitions and an extended partition, which could hold several logical stations. Every logical station would be seen as another partition. But that would make it necessairy to completely reconstruct your hardrive.
Therefore may I suggest that, instead of working with the unallocated space, you try to resize the first partition, adding the unallocated space to it. That will prevent the error message. The result would be what you wanted in the first place.
Be carefull and make back-ups! Working on that level on a drive always is a bit dangerous.

[Jonathan183]

Post the output of

fdisk -l

as ozar suggested so that we can see the disk partition structure ... the -l has a small L

[Gordon.Casper]

Damn I remember old times when I ran Dual boot... pain in the ass especially when the master boot record got distorted and I could not boot either