Allocating non-contiguous free space to an existing partition

I can't figure out how to add all the "/dev/sda3" space to my /dev/sda1/ .. I tried everything, but /dev/sda1/ can't go over 5.26GB.

Solution 1:

Unfortunately, gparted does not support online resizing of partitions. Thus, if you don't have advanced knowledge of Linux, you should boot from a Linux CD (e.g. the Ubuntu install CD/USB) and run gparted from there.

The easiest way then is to move the swap partition out of the way:

• right-click on /dev/sda5, Select swapoff (if applicable)
• delete /dev/sda5 (it doesn't contain any data, so don't worry)
• delete /dev/sda2
• re-create /dev/sda2 using right-click->New
  • set the "Size" to 1792 MB, the "Free space following" to 0 and the "Create as" to "Extended Partition"
• then, re-create /dev/sda5 inside /dev/sda2
  • set "Size" to the maximum available (~1792MB) and set the "File System" to "linux-swap".
• Finally, you can right-click on /dev/sda1, select "Resize/Move" and resize it

After you've rebooted, you should also update the UUID of the new swap partition. Do this:

sudo swapoff /dev/sda5 # this might give an error message which you can ignore
sudo mkswap -U`grep -E '^UUID.+swap\W+sw' /etc/fstab | cut -d= -f2 | cut -d' ' -f1` /dev/sda5

It should return Setting up swapspace ... and some numbers, and a UUID. Then you can re-enable the swap:

sudo swapon -a

Solution 2:

I am not 100% sure I remember exactly, but try first to move the swap partition so that the unallocated space is shown next to sda1, then it should be possible to enlarge that partition.

Solution 3:

If you have /dev/sda2 or a swap partition immediately after /dev/sda1, then you'll need to shrink and move them to the right so the free space is shown between /dev/sda1 and the other partitions.

Just note that this can take, for a 1TB HDD, over 10 hours to complete if there is a lot of data.