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Topic: How to fix disk dividing error in GParted?

I made mistake and now one of my logical disk with personal datas (/dev/sdb5 - ntfs - on the picture below) is within extended disc (/dev/sdb4). I must move /dev/sdb5 upper and rename it to /dev/sdb4. And other space 39.35 Gib will be unallocated to install LinuxMint and swap area.
Please help to fix my mistake. Sorry for my English.

https://postimg.org/image/7udky0qid/

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Re: How to fix disk dividing error in GParted?

The situation is tricky:
The partition system is obviously MBR, because of the presence of the extended partition. This means that you don't have /dev/sdb4 free to use as new partition. This device name is already taken by the extended partition.

I have to remind that the MBR structure supports 4 primary partitions only, or 3 primary + 1 extended partition (the extended partition can contain several or many logical partitions within the available disk space). I guess that the hard drive contains preinstalled o.s. and/or manufacturer's tools in the two small partitions, that you can't (or don't want) eventually delete to free a partition number.

I think the easier way is to backup the partition content (a double backup is recommended in case of important data), delete the logical partition /dev/sdb5, delete the extended partition /dev/sdb4, and create a new ntfs partition in the now free space of 332 GiB. There, you can restore the files from the backup. This new partition will be /dev/sdb4, because this will be the only available number in the partition table.

However, this means that you won't be able to make more partitions in the future, because of the MBR limitation (4 places in the partition table). The extended partition type was created in order to overcome this limitation.

Data partitions can be logical ones under ms windows as well as linux o.s. In practice, you need a primary partition for a ms windows system volume (Linux system volumes can be logical, at least in most of the cases). Why is mandatory to have that partition primary (not logical)?


Another remark: is /dev/sdb3 your system partition? if so, I see that is at 16% free space. This isn't good, and you risk to be out of space soon or later, after several system updates. So, I suggest that you leave some free space (30 or 40 GiB) just after the /dev/sdb3 end, to be able to expand it now or in the future.

In order to avoid this /dev/sdb3 resize, you could also relocate some data files or media files (video, audio, photo) to the data volume. I guess that some of the 99.6 GiB of files are non-system user files.

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***