Resize partitions in Gparted

I'm running Linux and Windows XP on the same HDD and my Linux partition is very small.

What I want to do is take about 10GB from any of the other partitions and add it to the Linux one. My hard drive is currently a big mess but you can have a look at what it looks like in GParted here gparted

I've tried following online tutorials but they all assume that the partitions that you are resizing are next to one another but this is not the case and I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing.

I'm not really fussed where I take the 10gb from, but I would ideally like to do it from sda6 since it has a bit more than any of the other drives.

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks


You can only add space to a partition if the free space is adjacent to the partition you wish to add it to.

You will have to do this in several steps from a live USB.

make sda6 smaller by 10 Gb -> apply changes

move sda5 -> apply changes

delete (or move) swap -> apply changes

add 10 Gb to your root partition -> apply changes.

I advise you clean up / re-order you hard drive numbers as labels sucs as "sda6" are meaningless, the free space has to be physically adjacent to your partition.

Se re-order, from a live usb, run

sudo fdisk /dev/sda

Then at the fdisk prompt

  • press “x” to enter Expert Mode
  • press “f” to fix the drive order
  • press “i” to ignore the warning (if it shows)
  • press “w” to write changes to the disk
  • press “q” to quit fdisk

See http://linux.die.net/man/8/fdisk or the built in help "h" for further information.

Then reboot and run gparted, in steps.