I decided to take the bull by the horns, I have the original 250GB drive which I clobed onto to a M2 drive and I an working with the M2 drive.
So, i booted from a live USB, opened GParted and moved sdb5 to be before the unallocated space. I then moved the unallocated space to the end of the drive,
I then resizedthe the linux partition to the maximum available, rebooted and it worked to my great relief.
You have deleted the windows Partition but the there is still an ntfs Partition (sdb1). Maybe I'm wrong with my Guess here but I think this could be the Windows Recovery Partition.