Claim space for a partition from another partition nearby?

Suppose there are two partitions side by side.

Is it possible to claim space for the right partition from the left partition?

Is it possible to claim space for the left partition from the right partition? Is it true that at the beginning of each partition there are always some data unmovable? That is one thing that makes me ask these questions. Or even movable, with current defragmentation tool in Windows, I don't see it can move all the data to the end of a partition and leave free space at the beginning.

Why? How to do these in both Windows 7 and Ubuntu?

Solution 1:

The Gparted live cd allows you to resize partitions, The tool allows you to choose which 'side' of the partition to leave the free space on after resizing.

Resize the one you want to take the space from and make it smaller (making sure to leave the free space on the correct 'side'), then resize the one you want to make bigger to eat this new free space.

At anytime you can undo your last action, or even start again from scratch, operations are performed only when you tell it to write the changes.

see: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php