Need help expanding Home partition into unallocated space

[locke456]

So Mint's grown on me more than I expected it to and it's become my primary work OS on my Win 7/Mint 15 dual-boot laptop. Unfortunately, this means I now need more room on my Home partition than I set it up with when first installing way back when.

I've shifted partitions around before using gparted, so I've gotten to the point where I've sliced a chunk off of my Win 7 partition (in Windows) and then booted off a LiveCD and loaded gparted to see this:

1.png

Now, where I want to get to is here:

2.png

I was able to do this (without applying changes) by moving the boot sector to the left, then merging the unallocated space with the Home partition. However, once I did this I had vague memories of having had done something similar before and in the process destroying the boot sector and necessitating a complete reinstall of Mint. gparted also gave me an error message along these lines, telling me that moving the boot sector might keep my computer from booting up at all. I originally set up the dual-boot using EasyBCD in Win 7, which from what I've read in other forums might make it difficult to recover from messing with the boot sector for reasons I don't understand very clearly.

So my questions are:
1. Can I perform the operations shown in the second picture without messing up my boot sector? If no, is the boot sector easy enough to recover that I can get back to dual-booting without needing to reinstall any entire OSs?

2. What's the deal with the random 2.8mb sliver of space at the far right of my hypothetical partition arrangement? Is that something I should be worried about? It seems to have just come out of nowhere.

Thanks for any help!

[kukamuumuka]

So my questions are:
1. Can I perform the operations shown in the second picture without messing up my boot sector? If no, is the boot sector easy enough to recover that I can get back to dual-booting without needing to reinstall any entire OSs?

2. What's the deal with the random 2.8mb sliver of space at the far right of my hypothetical partition arrangement? Is that something I should be worried about? It seems to have just come out of nowhere.

The operation should be ok in spite of GParted message. 2.8mb space is ok, so no worries about it.

[locke456]

Thanks for the reassurance. I'm going to give it a try after work in a few hours. If I have any boot trouble I'll be back

[locke456]

Nevermind; I went ahead and tried it right away. gparted got through the first step okay (moving the boot sector to the left). However, the second step (incorporating the unallocated space into the extended partition) failed with an error that said I cannot have "overlapping partitions." With only the first step complete, I was able to safely boot back into Mint and screen cap the partitions' current state.

Screenshot from 2013-10-03 13_31_15.png

How can I get sda4 to incorporate the unallocated space without errors? I'm not sure why it thinks that I'm overlapping partitions, because I shouldn't be...

[kukamuumuka]

How can I get sda4 to incorporate the unallocated space without errors? I'm not sure why it thinks that I'm overlapping partitions, because I shouldn't be...

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/h2-fix-msdos-pt.php
http://gparted-forum.surf4.info/viewtopic.php?id=16373

[locke456]

How can I get sda4 to incorporate the unallocated space without errors? I'm not sure why it thinks that I'm overlapping partitions, because I shouldn't be...

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/h2-fix-msdos-pt.php
http://gparted-forum.surf4.info/viewtopic.php?id=16373

Thanks! These helped a lot. I was able to get all the partitions shifted around correctly and now my Home partition is expanded (as pictured).

Screenshot from 2013-10-16 14_48_46.png

Unfortunately, in the process something I moved apparently screwed up the boot partition, because now Mint won't boot. When I restart the computer, it goes to the dual-boot menu (set up originally using this tutorial http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2012/06/06/how-to-dual-boot-linux-mint-13-cinnamonmate-and-windows-7/) and I can boot into Windows 7 from there. However, when I try to boot into Mint, it just stays at a black screen with a flashing command line cursor. I've left it sitting for at least ten minutes a few times and nothing happens. I imagine I need to rewrite the boot partition, but I'm not sure how to do that without wrecking the dual-boot setup. Any help would be very much appreciated. I'm almost there!

[locke456]

Is there a way to rerun the Mint installer from the LiveCD USB stick without having to overwrite all the Linux partitions? Obviously reinstalling Mint in its entirety would fix the problem, but I don't want to lose all my local data, installed programs, settings, etc. unless that's the only way to get Mint working again.

[locke456]

Nevermind. I just gave up and reinstalled.