Hi All,
I'm wanting to increase the size of my Zorin partition by reducing my windows partition (which I only ever use for opening cad drawings so don't need much spare space).
But there are some small partitions that appeared on their own when I upgraded to 17 and I'm not sure if I can delete them in order to make the two main partition adjacent.
Here's a screenshot.
I can't say for sure why the additional small partitions appeared during your upgrade to Zorin 17.
However, I have found an explanation for the "W95 FAT32" descriptions: your drive is MBR-formatted so you're only allowed 4 primary partitions, and to get around this the "extended" partition type was created to house additional "logical" partitions. Apparently these often show up with the label W95.
This is wild speculation, but maybe Ubuntu (or modern versions of linux in general) automatically create extended partitions when they detect that they're on MBR drives which already have 2 or 3 partitions, to prevent issues making more partitions later on. It could be that having 4 or more partitions is some arcane requirement for this house of cards to work properly? Filesystem witchcraft is a rabbit hole I fully intend to never fall into.
After some more research, it looks like this may just be an intermittent bug with Ubuntu's installer where it occasionally creates additional, empty EFI partitions on MBR disks for no apparent reason. The following Linux Mint forum thread revolves around clean installs, but the symptoms very much reflect what you have encountered.
Thanks Ultrabenosaurus
some interesting reading there, getting me closer to understanding the problem.
I'm still not completely certain though; can I be sure that deleting those partitions is safe?
Looking in gparted I see that none of them have any contents to speak of (although they do have 1 MiB......) so I'm planning to do that but it would be nice to get a second opinion.
What make and model of machine are you using and which version of Windows? I notice that none of the partitions being queried have any flags assigned to them. Certainly backing up everything is the first step. The only other comnent to make in terms of resizing the Zorin element this is only possible if you used LVM at point of install.
Hi Swarfendor,
the motherboard is an Asus P5K-VM
the windows version is 7
the zorin is 16.3 lite (I said above that I'm on 17, but actually I never did upgrade because of the XFCE business, amazingly I completely forgot this! The small empty partitions actually appeared when I put /home in it's own partition around about the same time)
I didn't use LVM when installing.
If I may I'd like to ask for a bit more detail about why I can't resize the zorin partition or if there's some workaround?
If I can change the size of partitions could I shrink the windows partition, leave but shrink the small empty partitions that are in between the windows and the zorin and expand the zorin extended partition?
Or maybe the only way is to just reinstall (after having shrunk the windows partition from inside windows) and rearrange everything using gparted from the live usb?
I don't actually care that much about removing those little partitions it's just that they are in the way between the other ones.
Given your current schema, you can resize it... but only to make it smaller. Unfortunately, with drives is not only a matter numbers (how much space you've got) but also how you arrange it. This is crucial, and while it may not seem important at first, it's times like this when planning ahead makes all the difference.
Not that you could've done anything about it since the installer left a bit of a mess in this case...
This would be the simplest solution, by far. If you are willing to contemplate this option I would certainly encourage you to try.
It's also a great excuse to do a bit of cleanup and delete files that you no longer need, etc.
The problem is not deleting partitions, it's moving them around the disk.
Imagine a tray of eggs. As you eat them, you pick the ones nearest to you from the fridge, such that every time you pick a new egg is a bit further away. One day you realize you are about to run out of eggs, so buy more. But you want to consume the eggs that have been the longest in the fridge first, so you have to move those eggs to the beginning of the tray, and then place the new ones in the back, right?
I hope the analogy is clear... anyway, that's essentially the issue here. Deleting the small partitions will be like consuming the eggs: it'll leave empty space for the taking. To take advantage of that space you have to move the partition belonging to Zorin OS over to the first free position. Unfortunately, to do that and retain all your files and data, you would have to move every single byte in that partition. That's over 200GB of data, in this case (that's a lot of eggs!) which will cause a lot of unnecessary read/writes to your drive, just to gain a single GB.
It would obviously be more efficient if you did this when the Windows partition is already resized, then you only have to move all this data once. But then again, why not just re-install and do the exact same thing, but saving some wear and tear to your drive?
