Having trouble with resizing partitions

[Elegant_Emperor]

First of all....Pardon me if a similar question had been asked before. I have searched the forum, but did not find anything that could help.

I am trying to resize my primary partition. I usually don't handle partitions so I am having a little trouble

I don't know what I have done till now...
Partition 2 which is labelled as Filesystem is the primary partition and I want to add the free space beside Partition 3(Volume 1) and Partition 4(Volume 2) into the primary partition.

[StarTreker]

@337harvey The emperor requests your audience, he wants to know how to resize his partitions. I hope he brought a solid deck of cards. Well, how else are you gonna make cute little partitions? HAHA I joke. Don't you worry about a thing, Harvey is our resident drive partition wizard, he shall whip up a bunch of partition fixer up in no time. HEHE

[Elegant_Emperor]

@337harvey

Any partition that is mounted cannot be adjusted.

But I cannot unmount my primary partition, can I?

[Elegant_Emperor]

Wait...do I have to boot from a bootable flash drive and then resize the partition??

[Elegant_Emperor]

@337harvey

Boot into the live image and perform your changes in disks.

@337harvey

That is why i said to use the live image... zorin iso. No you can't unmount your system partition while using it

Sorry, I read it in a hurry, so I missed it.

[Elegant_Emperor]

I have another question though,

What is this 'Partition 1' used for? It says partition type EFI system.

[Aravisian]

That is your bootloader, so please do not alter that...

[Elegant_Emperor]

Ok, thank you.

[Elegant_Emperor]

Ok...so I am trying to resize the partition after booting into live image but I can't increase the size. According the disks utility, the current size is the maximum size whereas I have free space available(see image above). Please help ASAP. I am in a hurry.

[Aravisian]

In order to resize into free space, the partition that is free space and the partition you are moving into it must be adjacent to each other (touching side by side).

[Elegant_Emperor]

How to make them adjacent?

[StarTreker]

I think you have to actually create the partitions in them.

For example, say you want partitions to be under Primary, that means you have to create them in Primary. I don't think you can move partitions from extended to Primary or vise versa. Please see Harvey's tutorial for more information.

[HOW TO] Partition & Install Zorin 16

This step-by-step guide will allow you to partition your hard drive (HDD, SSD, NVMe) so that installation goes a little more smoothly. This will work for a multi-boot system as well, but you will have to resize your Windows partition first and you will be using the Windows Boot Manager EFI partition instead of creating one. Otherwise, partitioning is pretty much the same. Please be sure to perform the steps in Before You Install prior to attempting any of these changes. Mistakes and rushing …

[Aravisian]

Tediously, I am sad to say. You must move one partition at a time, rebooting back into the LiveUSB each time.

[Elegant_Emperor]

Thank you, everyone.
I was able to resize my partition successfully.

[swarfendor437]

Just to add, Linux can only shrink not expand ... unless you enabled LVM (Large Volume Management) at point of install!