My dell computer laptop is about two years old already and I’m running a little short on storage space. I have been dual booting the dell computer laptop with Ubuntu Linux and Windows Vista, however I didn’t think it out thoroughly on the partitioning and thus I have linux partition here and there in between Windows Vista partition. At that time, storage space wasn’t an issue and I could use it without any problem. However recently, I have installed more and more software and it was running out of space. I also noticed it was running slower with less space. Usually when there is less space there will be less page file for swapping out the main memory into the hard disk.<\/p>\n
So it was time to do some readjustment and the best candidate to modify partitions is to use Gpart in Linux. The old stuff like Symantec Partition Magic which I use last time cannot handle the new NTFS and while Windows Vista could shrink or expand partitions, it could not handle Linux ext3 file system.<\/p>\n
So booting into Ubutu Linux, and firing up Gpart, I started to modify and adjust the partitions accordingly.<\/p>\n
My earlier HDD configuration was:<\/p>\n
Dell Computer Recovery 0.5GB
\nWindows Vista 40GB
\nLinux Swap 1GB
\nExt:
\n|_Windows NTFS 30GB
\n|_Linux Ubuntu 5GB<\/p>\n
Why on earth did I place the Linux swap in between two Windows partition, I don’t recall the reason. Now I needed to expand the Vista but the Linux swap and logical partition was in the way. The thing was, the moment I cleared the NTFS 30GB, the multi-boot loader GRUB crashed and I couldn’t boot up the Dell computer laptop at all!<\/p>\n
Oh, well it was a blessing in disguise because it was reason to download the latest Ubuntu 9.04 and replace over the older version 8. A two hours plus download, and then later installation and I have brand new spanking Ubuntu distro. Using the live CD to clear up the partitioning structure, I installed it.<\/p>\n