Moving/Resizing Partitions - Acer Laptop [Solved]

[Falcon]

I have an older Acer laptop that currently has Windows and MX-19 installed on it. There is 167 GB of unallocated space and I would like to utilize this space before installing MX-21. A screen shot from Gparted is shown below:

Gparted.png

I want to increase the size of sda3 to 100 Gb and use the remaining unallocated space to increase the size of sda2. It seems like the thing to do would be to move the Linux Swap partition to the end of the drive, then stretch sda3 to the beginning of the swap file, and then increase the size of sda2 until sda3 equals 100 Gb.

I started Gparted and attempted to Move the swap file to the end of the unallocated space, but no options to do this were available. The only options were Swapoff and Manage Flags. I'm using the MX-21 Live-USB to do these operations. I'm a little reluctant to start "trying things" for fear of making the system unbootable. How should I proceed to get the drive allocate the way that I want it?

[Huckleberry Finn]

To increase the size of sda2 : The right-side of it needs to be empty ; so you need to move both sda3 and sda4 :

• Right click on sda3 "copy" , then right click on un-allocated space: "paste".

• When finished, delete the original one. "Apply".

• Now resize sda3 to the right side , in its new place .

• Now sda4 , same way ; copy-paste, delete the original.

• Finally resize sda2.

(All on live-session & when none are mounted)

[toolmanz]

Hello all.
I am a huge fan of MX21 and I can't say enough about how logical, intuitive and simple this distro is. It meets all my needs (gaming, VM's, daily driver) and I was able to set everything up with out much assistance .... a rarity.

I have a question .... I want to do the same thing as this post describes except I want to drop the size of my root partition and increase the home partition size.

I am currently using 19Gb in the root partition and have allocated about 200Gb.

I want to reduce this to about 80Gb for root and add the 120 Gb saved to the home directory.

I will use one of by rescuecd's which comes with gparted - unmount the drives to enable the program to work away ....

Keeping in mind that the home partition is the last partition and the root partition is first after EFI.

I will report on how it goes....I will try and use the instructions provided by Huckleberry Finn and retrofit.

I use the Oracle VM to try out other distros - and they do take up a lot of space.

Cheers

toolmanz

[towwire]

To increase the size of sda2 : The right-side of it needs to be empty ; so you need to move both sda3 and sda4 :

• Right click on sda3 "copy" , then right click on un-allocated space: "paste".

• When finished, delete the original one. "Apply".

• Now resize sda3 to the right side , in its new place .

• Now sda4 , same way ; copy-paste, delete the original.

• Finally resize sda2.

(All on live-session & when none are mounted)

I don't think what you told him will work as I think his disk Partition Table type DOS, so your copy should not work. He already has 4 Primary Partitions.

If he is going to install MX21 in place of his MX19 then he can only move them and resize. If he want to have both then he would need to delete swap and create an extended partition to do copying.

[Huckleberry Finn]

delete swap and create an extended partition to do copying.

That will do it.

Just, this time you need to chroot into MX19 on live session and change its /etc/fstab (to the new swap's uuid) finally update initramfs.

[Huckleberry Finn]

@toolmanz welcome to the forum and thank you for the nice words. Just, a new thread with such a screenshot (if possible) would be better :)

[toolmanz]

Ok will do.

And it works! I will write the details of the how to later today and post.

And this was just like everything else in MX21 - worked first time!

I dont have a DOS partition so that didn't complicate things.

Cheers

toolmanz

[Huckleberry Finn]

it works!

Also: @Falcon in case you decide to install MX21 on sda2 (and ditch 19) you can simply delete swap (first swapoff) , then do them, finally re-create a swap partition.

[Falcon]

Huckleberry,

I guess I forgot to state this but my intention is to install MX-21 over MX-19. I just wanted to get the disk set up first before I overwrote 19 with 21.

So will your instructions in Post #2 above work, since I won't be adding any new partitions, just moving or resizing the ones that already exist? I believe that toolmanz was thinking that I wanted to keep 19 and add an installation of 21.

[Huckleberry Finn]

just moving or resizing the ones that already exist

Yes, but when you try to copy-paste sda3 to unallocated space, it'll be 5 primary partitions and it won't let you even temporarily. Therefore, in all cases you need to sacrifice one of the current partitions (just to drop the number to 3 first) and the simplest is to delete the Swap partition.

Consequently: An extended partition will be good for future (you'll get rid of limitation of 4 primary partitions).

So:

• Either do it as in #8 :
  
  Simply delete the Swap first,
  Then copy-paste sda3 and delete the original sda3 ,
  Enlarge sda2 to the right-most ,
  Create a new swap in un-allocated space ,
  Install MX 21 on sda2

• Or:
  
  Delete the Swap (First, right-click on it: "Swapoff" , then delete ... ) ,
  Then create an Extended Partition (use the whole unallocated space) ,
  Then copy-paste sda3 into the Extended Partition and delete the original sda3 ,
  Enlarge sda2 to the right-most ,
  Create a new swap within the Extended Partition ,
  Install MX 21 on sda2