Dual boot partitions.

Artful_Badger

I have Ubuntu and Windows on my machine and I need more space on windows. Disk utilities is showing free space which I assume is the unused space on the linux partition which I had first.

Is it ok to grab a chunk of that and format it for use in windows ? Or is the a risk of that messing up linux ?

humbert

It doesn't work like that. Unused space (as in currently available to Windows, poor choice of expression) is inside a partition, what that's saying is that you have unpartitioned space. If you wanted to use the unused space on your Ubuntu partition you'd have to shrink the Ubuntu partion first and then expand the windows partition. Luckily you don't have to do that and even more luckily the free space is after your windows partition so it won't even have to move any files.

Curious that you had such a large chunk of unused space without having intentionally left it unused.

Artful_Badger

humbert wrote: »

It doesn't work like that. Unused space (as in currently available to Windows, poor choice of expression) is inside a partition, what that's saying is that you have unpartitioned space. If you wanted to use the unused space on your Ubuntu partition you'd have to shrink the Ubuntu partion first and then expand the windows partition. Luckily you don't have to do that and even more luckily the free space is after your windows partition so it won't even have to move any files.

Curious that you had such a large chunk of unused space without having intentionally left it unused.

Thats what I thought at first and was looking into re-sizing the partitions until I seen the free space. As you say its curious that its there at all so I assumed it was something to do with linux as I had that on the machine first.

Only reason I can think of why its there is that the machine originally came with windows and the hard drive was partitioned at the time I think. So perhaps I installed Ubuntu over windows forgot about the other volume (which might have been for media storage) and then partitioned my linux partition for dual boot to re-install windows.

Johnboy1951

I would be inclined to get a second opinion on the partition layout ...... just in case Windows is misinterpreting things it knows little about.

Maybe a Gparted liveCD to examine the partitions, and work with them ....

Artful_Badger

This is the view from the linux disk utility. Unallocated space is there but I'm not sure what the 123GB Extended bit is.

Artful_Badger

Checked it with GParted and Windows had it right. And that Extended part is just the actual size of the linux partition while the other one is current size or something ? Anyway I reckon I'm good to format that volume and use it for storage in windows.

croo

Extended part is just the actual size of the linux partition while the other one is current size or something ?

A hard disk can only have 4 primary partitions ... so if you needed more then you could create an extended partition and then, within it, create additional partitions.

Artful_Badger

croo wrote: »

A hard disk can only have 4 primary partitions ... so if you needed more then you could create an extended partition and then, within it, create additional partitions.

Ah right, now I get it. The extended partition is the unallocated space plus the swap space. Should have got that from 110 + 13 = 123

croo

Artful_Badger wrote: »

Ah right, now I get it. The extended partition is the unallocated space plus the swap space. Should have got that from 110 + 13 = 123

That's it. And because the free space is in an extended partition you will not be able to allocate it to the windows partition.

You could drop the extended partition itself (you might have kill the swap partition first), resize the windows the partition and then recreate the swap. I don't think you actually need the extended partition in this case (?) - the swap would be the 4th partition.

Either way you'll most probably need to edit the /etc/fstab to to make sure the swap is using the correct partition when you've finished.

Artful_Badger

I just set it up as a separate volume for storage which is handy as I can access it and use it in Linux for storage too.