partition issues

[Ralf Mardorf]

To avoid confusion, I removed some unwanted artefact of my original
reply ;).

On Wed, 25 Oct 2017 09:36:27 +0300, Gary J. Kirkpatrick wrote:
>I can not expand SDA1 (I booted with a live cd). There is a an
>unallocated sector that I can not delete and thus I can not expand
>SSD1 to take up the free space I created by removing 17.04 which was
>installed in sda 6  

Please post details.

Assuming you are using MBR with just one primary partition, I suspect
that your partition table looked like this:

sda1 16.04 LTS
sda2 extended partition
sda5 linux-swap
sda6 17.10 (there is no 17.04 LTS)
Somewhere already was an unallocated sector, e.g. due to the drives
geometry and block size.

You removed sda6 so now it should look like this:

sda1 16.04 LTS
sda2 extended partition
sda5 linux-swap
sda6 doesn't exist anymore, it is replaced by
     "regular" unallocated sectors, aka free space
_But_ somewhere is an "irregular" unallocated sector, not part of the
"regular" unallocated sectors.

I don't know if actually the unallocated sector is the issue, did you
e.g. shrink the extended partition, after moving the other partitions,
to provide the unallocated space to extend the primary partition?

Again, we need details.

>Also I have 9.2 gigs of swap in SDA 5.  That seems excessive or even
>totally unnecessary.  Ok to remove?  

Yesno, but don't let us operate on two construction zones. Let's solve
your issue step by step.

Regards,
Ralf