partition issues

[Colin Law]

On 25 October 2017 at 11:00, Ken D'Ambrosio <ken at jots.org> wrote:
> On 2017-10-25 05:12, Colin Law wrote:
>>
>> On 25 October 2017 at 09:12, Gary J. Kirkpatrick <garyartista at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> I am trying to expand into sda6.  I want o eventually join sda6 and sda1
>>> to
>>> get the most space.  Of course I can use sda6 now by mounting it and then
>>> storing to it.  Not a huge problem but we should be able to remove those
>>> itty bitty unallocated areas.
>>>
>>>
>>> Partition     File System   Size         Used        Unused
>>>
>>> sda 1            ext 4            84 gig       75          9
>>> sda2             extended     27 gig      -              -
>>>   unallocated                      6.5 mb
>>>   sda6            ext4            17.75 g  457 mb   17.3g
>>>   unallocated                      2.47
>>>   sda5           linux swap    9.32g       0            9.32g
>>>
>>> Hope that is not to hard to read.
>>>
>>> I'l figure out how to send in plain text.
>>
>>
>> You can't expand into an existing partition. You can shrink or remove
>> that partition and then expand another partition into the free space.
>> If you want to expand sda1 then remove sda6, shrink sda2 to free up
>> the space at the front, then expand sda1
>
>
> Colin's heart is in the right place, but he forgot an important detail: sda6
> and sda5 are extended partitions that reside, in turn, on sda2.  So you can
> resize (presumably; I'm not sure I've ever tried this) sda6, but then you'll
> need to move sda5 to the rightward boundary, and THEN you'll need to resize
> sda2, too.

I don't think I forgot anything. According to the information above
sda5 is already at the top (or right) of sda2 so cannot be moved.
after removing sda6 then sda5 can be shrunk (upwards from the bottom)
so there is no space at the front of sda5. The free space will then be
between sda1 and sda2 so sda1 can be extended.

Colin