cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

How to Resize a Partition on "live" installations? ?

shutter
Community Veteran
Posts: 22,206
Thanks: 3,769
Fixes: 65
Registered: ‎06-11-2007

How to Resize a Partition on "live" installations? ?

For those following my previous threads, and others who may be interested....  I am ALMOST ready to ditch WINDOWS 7 pro as the number one OS on my dual boot laptop, now that I have LINUX MINT 19.1 and Virtual Box, running WIn7pro.

 

SO.. the question is.. how do I remove Windows 7 pro , the original install on this HDD, and then resize the whole partition so that LINUX MINT19.1 becomes the prime user .... without destroying all the work that I have done.

 

Yes.. I have got a cloned copy of the Win 7 pro on another hard drive safely tucked away..

Yes, I have ( I think ) copied over all the relevant/useful files and folders to the LINUX MINT 19.1 O.S.

(anything that I do find is missing, will most likely be on the cloned hdd).

 

Here are some pics... that my help.. 

 

P1090144.JPGP1090145.JPGP1090146.JPGP1090147.JPGP1090148.JPGP1090149.JPG

4 REPLIES 4
VileReynard
Hero
Posts: 12,616
Thanks: 582
Fixes: 20
Registered: ‎01-09-2007

Re: How to Resize a Partition on "live" installations? ?

It will be a bit messy, especially because of that irritating extended partition...

If it was me:smiley: I would consider using this opportunity to move your /home directory into a separate partition (the windows one, reformatted as ext4) instead of using your present /home buried in sda5 - this splits of your user preferences and data from overall system settings and programs.

This isn't a simple task but it is worthwhile (after /home has been moved you could probably reduce that extended partition to 30GB).

You should boot a Linux USB to run gparted from, as gparted requires partitions to be unmounted.

You will need to change a couple of settings in your /etc/fstab file and do a careful grub-update - but it's do-able.

I'm going away for a few weeks, so I hope someone else picks up on this - there's more than one way to skin a cat!

 

 

"In The Beginning Was The Word, And The Word Was Aardvark."

shutter
Community Veteran
Posts: 22,206
Thanks: 3,769
Fixes: 65
Registered: ‎06-11-2007

Re: How to Resize a Partition on "live" installations? ?

@VileReynard  Thanks for the info.... looks to be quite a complicated thing to try and do... especially for me... a newbie to Linux...

Was wondering if it would be possible to "copy" just the Linux part of the Hard drive. on to either a USB stick or a Hard drive in a caddy, then wipe the 500gb and re copy back the Linux part to the "clean" hdd ?   Is there a prog like a clone prog that can do this? 

 

PeeGee
Pro
Posts: 1,217
Thanks: 84
Fixes: 3
Registered: ‎05-04-2009

Re: How to Resize a Partition on "live" installations? ?

@shutter To copy, repartition and copy back you need a separate running system.

The tool to use should be UBCD (just google it). It has a myriad of maintenance tools, but gparted (partition management), partimage and  clonezilla (both partition cloning) are included in parted magic and will do what you want - also, if you "shrink" the partitions with gparted it could save a lot of copying time and you can copy back and expand the partitions, in sequence, to the size and order you want.

I have a stripped down (5.5GB) version of my main system in a 10GB partition on an old 160GB laptop drive in a USB caddy specifically for maintenance purposes, with scripts for partition backup etc.

Phil

Plusnet FTTC (Sep 2014), Essentials (Feb 2013); ADSL (Apr 2009); Customer since Jan 2004 (on 28kb dial-up)
Using a TP-Link Archer VR600 modem-router.
shutter
Community Veteran
Posts: 22,206
Thanks: 3,769
Fixes: 65
Registered: ‎06-11-2007

Re: How to Resize a Partition on "live" installations? ?

@PeeGee  Thanks for your reply... I have at least 3 laptops available,... one is this one with the dual boot.. another one is a small 10inch laptop with Win7  on  ( may have dual boot ... long time since I used it ). and one my wife doesn`t use much...  plus various usb sticks. 

Will have a look at that UBCD tomorrow.... am busy doing a re-install on another machine at the moment.

Thanks again.  Wink