Unable to fuse two partitions after flash drive cloning

[jimwg]

Greetings!

I just today, via users directions, cloned my 8gig Maya Nadia (bootable) flash into a 16gig drive via Clonezilla, resulting in a drive with 6.2 gig used partition and a 7.6gig unallocated one. (btw it boots okay and everything -- spartan set-up just like the master copy; has no SWAP partition -- was told it was unneeded back then). Now I want to fully use the drive's unused space. I was told to use gParted to create a new ext4 partition to take up all the unallocated space then highlight its comment bar for a cut and paste but the cut and paste item under partition menu won't unghost. That partition still says ms file system. Do I I have to convert the partition to linux somehow and how? I have a screenshot of the gparted screen if that can help anyone solve this. Thanks for any hints.

Jim in NYC

[viking777]

First thing to remember, you can't do anything to partitions whilst they are mounted, so if you have that dratted automount option enabled then it has possibly mounted the partitions on the usb device and you will have to unmount them before doing anything else.

Second, the stuff about 'cut and paste' that you have written above is completely unintelligible to me. If you want to use the whole device for your mint install you just use gparted to right click on the existing mint partition on that device and select 'resize' - it will take a long time.

[jimwg]

First thing to remember, you can't do anything to partitions whilst they are mounted, so if you have that dratted automount option enabled then it has possibly mounted the partitions on the usb device and you will have to unmount them before doing anything else.

Second, the stuff about 'cut and paste' that you have written above is completely unintelligible to me. If you want to use the whole device for your mint install you just use gparted to right click on the existing mint partition on that device and select 'resize' - it will take a long time.

Okay, I had tried the gParted thing before with a Nadia flash drive with gParted installed and was puzzled why its Disk utility wouldn't allow me to dismount the cloned flash drive in question for gParted to work on expanding its partition. Turns out that a Mint 13 flash drive with own Disk utility version was able to do that dismount and enable gParted to expand the sole partition on the drive. There seems to be that vital difference of Disk utilities between Mint 13 and 14. Also, maybe I lucked out, but while gPart and others claimed that expanding the partition would take a long time, it did the job for me in under two minutes. I have successfully cloned my used 6.8gigs on a 8gig flash drive to a 16gig flash drive now with 8.2gig free space! Great! I only hope that the powers that be would outfit Clonezilla with a gPart-like feature, and that that current Mint Disk utility get back the features in its Mint 13 version.

Thanks for your input!

Jim in NYC