I bought a new laptop with no OS and decided to try to Linux (Ubuntu) for the first time in my life. It was a clean install, my laptop had no other OS present in it, not even DOS.
While installing, it asked for partitioning. Out of the 320GB of free space I created a new partition of 20 GB and installed Ubuntu in it. The rest of the 300GB is still available as free space.
Soon I realized that I can't use the 300GB of space and that only 20GB is available to me for use.
Can anyone tell me how I can take away some free space away from the 300GB and add that to my 20GB partition?
I have installed the Gparted Partition editor from the Ubuntu Software Center but have no idea how to go ahead with it.
Thanks :)
Start your laptop with Ubuntu Live CD and run Gparted from there. Then select your 20 GB partition, right click on it and click resize. Resize it to use all the free space and click apply. Reboot your system after removing the CD and thats it.
Your best using a live cd as you can't resize a mounted partition. gparted have a live CD here, download and burn it to cd, boot from it then select partion edittor you should then see a visual layout of your hard disk I think if you right click on your 20gb partition you should get the object to expand it.
There is a good video tut here
You could use Gparted from the Live CD/USB and expand the 20GB Ubuntu partition. You have to do it from CD/USB. Trying to modify a system partition from from within the installation won't work because the partition won't be editable. Gparted is preinstalled on all Ubuntu CDs.
Another option is reinstall, and let Ubuntu have all of the space. Make a backup first, in case there is stuff to backup.
20GB if fine for Ubuntu. You could create another partition in the remaining space and move all your data there. The idea is to separate data from operating system. I like to encrypt the data partition. Use Ubuntu's disk utility -- it's a great tool. Link your data (docs,pics etc) to your home directory and your done.