can partitioning be restructured or must I start over

[Hakan Koseoglu]

Allen Meyers wrote:
> Snapshot resides at http://s427.photobucket.com/albums/pp352/76yrold/
> My question is can that unallocated space in the 2 places be combined to 
> create a new partition. As a side note what about that extended 17.85 
> GiB that info says is busy (at least one logical partition mounted)
> I know shows what lack of comprehension can do!!
It's easy. All of your free space is at the end of the disk.

Boot from a CD-only system (knoppix, System Rescue CD etc.).
Make sure that all partitions are not mounted. Some of these CDs will use any swap file systems on disk automatically. Unmount all such file systems.

Su to root if not already done.
Then run fdisk.
Write down the existing start and end blocks on to a piece of paper.

Delete the sda5 and sda6 partitions. No data has been lost yet. You only deleted the markers where the partitions start and end.

Delete the extended partition sda3.

Create a new extended partition, this time starting at the original location and ending at the end of the disk.

Create partitions 5 and 6 at their original places by using the numbers you have noted down earlier.

Until now you haven't made any changes to the disk yet. If you are unhappy, exit fdisk and nothing will change. If you are happy, continue.

Save the changes and reboot. Now you have a larger extended partition with an empty block of space at the end.

Actually while doing this I would delete the swap partition proper and move it to the end of the disk and then resize the /dev/sda6 to use the remaining space.

Next time I would suggest using LVM, makes these operations significantly easier.