partition merging

[tenzan]

Hello,
When I installed Mint I was given the option of keeping my WinXP installation, and I kept it as I had lots of disk space to spare (turned out it was a good idea, as I wanted a BIOS update afterwards which was much easier to do under Windows). Now that I have less and less need for the Windows partition I would like to delete it and merge with my main Linux partition. Question: do I have to wipe the HD to do that or can Linux also convert and merge the NTFS partition into my main partition?

Tenzan

[mr_raider]

Partitions can't be merged. You can delete the partitions that are no longer needed, then expand the existing partitions over them to reclaim the space.

However it depends on your current layout. The best info for us would be start gparted take screenshot of your disk layout and post it here.

Or post the output of

sudo parted -l

[tenzan]

Thanks, I meant that I wanted to delete the NTFS partition and absorb the free space. My output from parted is

Model: ATA ST3250820AS (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 250GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 32.3kB 60.0GB 60.0GB primary ntfs boot
2 60.0GB 250GB 190GB extended
5 60.0GB 246GB 186GB logical ext4
6 246GB 250GB 4216MB logical linux-swap(v1)

No complications from deleting the primary boot partition I hope?

Thanks,
Tenzan

[Flemur]

Code: Select all

Number  Start   End     Size    Type      File system     Flags
 1      32.3kB  60.0GB  60.0GB  primary   ntfs            boot
 2      60.0GB  250GB   190GB   extended
 5      60.0GB  246GB   186GB   logical   ext4
 6      246GB   250GB   4216MB  logical   linux-swap(v1)

No complications from deleting the primary boot partition I hope?

My "boot" partition is sda2, which doesn't boot anything - I'm not sure "boot" means anything in linux.

Anyway -
- BACK-UP YOUR STUFF. Not necessarily the OS itself, but your data (music, etc) and probably your $HOME.

- you'll have to reinstall grub after extending sda5 because you'll be moving the partition with the /boot directory.
(AFAIK grub keeps a hard pointer to either the /boot directory or the start of the partition /boot is on).

- sda5=linux is inside an extended partition, which might make things interesting.
-- delete sda1, then
-- move sda2 to the start of the disk and have the other two partitions inside it, or move them outside the extended part?

[tenzan]

Thanks, I'd actually backed up most my stuff already as I had thought I'd have to erase the NTFS partition. I will follow your instructions.

Tenzan