How To Resize and Shrink Hard Disk Partitions using GParted

This tutorial will show a basic method to resize and shrink hard disk drive partitions and filesystems that can be practiced for any computer as well as laptop. You will need an Ubuntu Livecd which GParted software is available built-in either in form of a DVD or USB flash drive to do so. Our way to explain this is by using examples of C, D, and E drives and comic pictures with the hope of you can follow it easily. Now let’s learn and practice.

 

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To make the capacity larger to C partition, it requires an unallocated space next to it. This means there are two choices to do partition enlargement:

First choice is when there is an enough unallocated space next to C partition:

1. Select C Disk Drive.
2. Right-click > Resize/Move.
3. A dialog will show.
4. Enter new bigger size in number to New Size box. For example, if current C is 5000 MiB, and you want to enlarge it to 10000 MiB (twice its size), then delete 5000 and fill in 10000, as long as the new size is not larger than the what the unallocated can provide.
5. Click Resize/Move.
6. The dialog will close and a new job of Grow will show on main window with a new unallocated will show under the selected partition. This is not yet applied.
7. Click Apply button.
8. Click Apply/OK.
9. GParted will show Applying pending operations for a while. Wait for it to finish.
11. Click Close.

First choice finished. 

Second choice finished.

To make the capacity smaller to C partition:

1. Select C partition (/dev/sda1)
2. Right-click > Resize/Move.
3. A dialog will show.
4. Enter new size to New Size (MiB) box. For example, from 10000 MiB to 5000 MiB (half the size).
5. Click Free space following (MiB) box in order to see the changes preview. The slider will move to illustrate the new capacity. In this example, it is now half the size.
6. Click Resize/Move.
7. The dialog will close and a new job of Shrink will show on main window with a new unallocated will show under the selected partition.
8. Click Apply button.
9. Click Apply/OK.
10. GParted will show Applying penting operations for a while. Wait for it to finish.
11. Click Close.
12. Main window will show 0 operations pending status to the bottom and the result of shrinking as now the partition list changed. Notice the unallocated item.

To enlarge or shrink D, E, and other disk partitions including partitions in USB flash drive as well as NVME SSD is the same as what explained above. You can do that.

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GParted Basic Guide

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This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.