Is there anyway to

[SoundJam]

Merge hard drive partitions? I didn't really know what I was doing during install and wound up leaving myself with over 100GB of unallocated hard drive space. if I create a new partition out of this, could I possibly merge it with another? and if I do, should I merge it with root or home? I am using 10.10, by the way.

[Jonathan183]

There are several options available, the output of

sudo fdisk -l
df -h

would be useful for answering in your case.

[SoundJam]

ok, so I went ahead and ran that through Terminal. after a password prompt, this came up.

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xd039dd4d

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 608 4881408 83 Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 * 608 1216 4882432 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 10507 15727 41929742+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

the sda3 is a partition I used to save files from my previous OS before switching over to Ubuntu. I am fairly new to Linux all-together and am un-certain as to where to go from here. any additional help would be greatly appreciated.

[Jonathan183]

You have
sda1 (5G)
sda2 (5G)
unused space (76G)
sda3 (42G)
unused space (30G)

You are going to need to move partitions ! You can only have 4 primary partitions on the drive (one can be an extended partition - which can then contain logic partitions).

I assume you can boot from a live CD with partitioning tools (gparted) ... which is available on the Ubuntu live CD. I suggest backup data to external drive if you can before starting to change partition structure. Then decide what you want partitions to look like in the end ... can you also post df -h output (can't tell if sda1 or sda2 is root or home partitions etc).

I'd say for the root partition you want 20 to 25GB, and the rest you can split between a home partition, data partition (if you want a separate data partition), the existing ntfs partition (if you intend keeping it).

Moving the large partition with a lot of data will take quite a while ... it also means if you loose power or something else goes wrong while changing the partition you may loose data.

Personally I'd create a 30GB partition at the end of the drive (after the NTFS partition). Copy data from the NTFS partition to it, then delete the existing NTFS partition. Mount each partition one at a time, check the contents then set the partition label to something meaningfull to you (that way you are less likely to overwrite data by accident).

[Draciron]

A couple things I'd like to add too what Jonathan1 wrote.

First make sure your Linux partitions are on primary partitions. Windows cannot see more than one primary partition. If you put Linux on an extended partition windows will constantly bug you to format that partition and may well do it without your knowledge. Linux can handle multiple primary partitions just fine.

You may well want to use LVM instead of ext3 or ext4 for your data and home partitions. Never never never use LVM for your root partition. LVM will sometimes hiccup and it's easy enough to recover your LVM partitions if your / partition is still good. What LVM will allow you to do is to dynamically enlarge or shrink partitions as you need too. Since your still unsure of what you want for either partition this might might be a good thing. LVM will also allow you to have one partition that spans multiple drives. So if you add another drive you can format it as LVM and just add it to /data. Or if you come over to the dark side completely you can format your ntfs partition as LVM and add it to /data