can partitioning be restructured or must I start over

[Derek Broughton]

Karl Larsen wrote:

> Rashkae wrote:
>> 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!!
>>>     
>> You're lucky, all your Unallocated spaces are adjacent.
>>
>> You need to resize the extended partition (sda3).  Once the extended
>> partition takes up the entire space, then you can resize your last
>> logical partition within to grow it.
>>
>> You will likely need to do this from a boot cd, such as the Ubuntu
>> install disk, or knoppix.
>>   
>     The resize is done with fdisk or other partition tool. You can do
> the re-size from the computer, but you need to put a file system on the
> new partition. This you must do from another place because you can't put
> a file system on a mounted partition.

Well, no.  It's true you can't put a filesystem on a mounted partition, but
you neither mount the extended partition nor the new partition.

Personally, I wouldn't even bother resizing anything, but create a Logical
Volume under LVM, but let's not go there yet...

Boot from a LiveCD.  From there you can use gparted to extend the size of
the Extended partition to include the remainder of the disk.  Then create a
new logical partition in the unused space.  To this point, you have not
even touched a live filesystem.

The last step is to put a filesystem on the new partition - you should be
able to do that either with gparted or after rebooting - and create a mount
point for it.
-- 
derek