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How can I merge the highlighted partition with the 500 GB unallocated space at the end of the drive?
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
This is an external ssd, so I'm not super worried about things going wrong.
Move the NTFS partitions, one at a time, toward the end of the drive. Let gparted complete each operation seperately. When you're done you should have all the NTFS partitions stacked at the back end of the drive but without having to change their UUID and sda#. Moving the 160G partition will take awhile, but just be patient, make sure the power doesn't fail and the drive is securely connected and won't get bumped during the operation, and let it do its thing. Then you can simply expand the ext4 partition into the newly available space ahead of the NTFS partitions.
Gparted is the only partition editor I've ever used that has successfully moved NTFS partitions on a drive without breaking a Windows install. I'm convinced it's the best out there, I always keep a live image of it around. It's an essential tool. I've done this exact thing to rearrange partitions on a dual-boot system, though it was a significantly smaller drive.
*edit: this is an external SSD, so do you actually boot from it? If not and you just want to keep the data on the Windows partition, you can just delete the other smaller NTFS partitions.
You can definitely just delete the linux-swap and create a new one wherever it's convenient.
How do I move the partitions?
Is this your first time using gparted?
Here's an example with pictures:
https://gparted.org/display-doc.php?name=moving-space-between-partitions
Basically you're going to select the partition, then click Resize/Move and then drag the end of the partition all the way to the right and then the beginning of the partition as far to the right as you want (the final size of the partition does not have to stay exactly the same as it is now, but dont squash them down to exactly the size of the data that's currently in the partition, leave some extra space).
The difference between this example and your situation is that your partitions are not inside of an extended partition (yours are all primary partitions). This doesn't matter, you only need to worry about moving the start and end points of each primary partition.
Start with the partition that is furthest to the right.
Thanks a lot, I somehow could not find this information in my search yesterday.