How to merge an unallocated partition with an extended partition?

Solution 1:

Free space must be adjacent to a partition to make increasing the size of that partition possible.

You can use gparted running from a Live CD to move that 268GB partition (mysteriously called "C") to the front of the free space. Then you can increase the size of the extended partition.

If you get an error from gparted during the resize process (it boils doen to partitions cannot overlap) then you've hit a bug in the gparted version shipped with Ubuntu 12.10 (it is 0.12.1).

• Download the latest version of Gparted Live
• burn that to a CD
• boot your Computer from that CD (you have to answer a few uncritical questions here)
• the last question allows you to "autostart gparted", which is what you want
• now select the drive you need and there the extended partition (easiest done in the table)
• right click on that line and select "resize/move" to get the following
• now you can drag the left arrow as far as you want to increase the partition

Solution 2:

As I see your partition table, the 268 GB parition lies in between the free space and the extended partition,which makes it (perhaps) impossible to merge without deleting the 268 GB partition. You need to delete this one and then reallocate the free partition to the extended one and then create the 268 GB extended partition.

Solution 3:

I had the same problem. Could not merge unallocated space to the extended partition next to it using gparted. After hours of trying many things with the live CD, I tried Parted Magic LiveCD. I could make all the changes fine. The were warnings that the system / dual boot may not work. I`m hoping it will be fine as it is still busy moving data.

Parted Magic LiveCD

Solution 4:

There are some of my operation photos, hope helpful:

• 0. BACKUP YOUR DATA (!!!)

• 1. use Gparted Live CD/USB boot,
• 2. swap off
• 3. just do as @guntbert answered,merge unallocated partition with extended partition.

• first photo

• second photo

According to your screenshot,there are two main system partition, just assume you want to merge unallocated partition (next to windows) to which ext4 partition in extended partition (maybe your linux partition)

the problem is that: your unallocated partition is far from your ext4 partition,you shoud move it to the left of the ext4 partition ,then you can merge them.