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We'll move the arrow until about 5 GB is freed in front. The new free space is represented by the gray area directly to the left of the the arrow. Rather than moving the arrow, you could also have entered the amount of space you wanted directly into the "Free Space Preceding" form:
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Click the Resize/Move button.
Now let's select the partition we want to enlarge, hda2. Click Resize/Move, and there will be a window similar to what we've seen before. We want to use the freed space immediately following the partition, so grab the right arrow and pull it all the way to the right:
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You will see the extended graph cover all the available space, with the new space being about twice as large as it was before:
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Again, click Resize/Move.
Now that we've told GParted what to do, we're going to tell it to go ahead and do it. Click on Apply, and you'll see a final warning:
If you're sure you've backed up all your data and that you want to do this, click Apply.
Using a graphical tool like GParted hides a lot of the complexity of partitioning. The first operation we asked it to do, freeing up space in front of the partition, actually involves resizing and moving the partition. A lot of data has to be checked and copied, so it takes some time. For this operation, resizing two partitions by 5 GB and moving one, it took a little over two hours. Operations involving moving more data and more partitions will take longer.
Now you can tell your grandchildren about how easy free software made it to repartition your hard drive. Your stories will still suck, but at least your data is safe.
Article comments
1 - linuser
Oh, it's now actually possible to move the beginning of an ext3 partition when resizing it? Great, I didn't know that, but very useful!
2 - Steve Wild
Thanks. Yes, open source repartitioning has come a long way in a short time. I was surprised at how much is possible to do. GParted can also do a lot more than was covered in the article, like cloning partitions.
3 - Sunil
OK, here's something that happened. I needed space for my new distro. I've already got Windows XP and OpenSuSE 10.2. Since I had lot of space on the ext3 partition of linux, I resized the /home partition by shrinking it. But, 'unfortunately' it made is a unallocated partition. How do I make the new distro identify this new unallocated partition?
4 - Barry
Is that the same Percival from Lord of the Flies?