Questions[partitioning](ubuntu)

I have been unable to format/delete the partitions on my Sandisk Cruzer Force 32 GB USB Drive. I get the following error when deleting any of the partitions on it.

`Error deleting partition /dev/sdd2: Command-line `parted --script "/dev/sdd" "rm 2"' exited with non-zero exit status 1: Warning: The driver descriptor says the physical block size is 2048 bytes, but Linux says it is 512 bytes.
(udisks-error-quark, 0)

Is there any way I can completely format all of my drive and turn it into one large partition? I haven't found a solution to this particular error here yet, so I thought I'd actually ASK for once

I'd like to see the full How-To on how to use manual partitioning during Ubuntu installation. The existing guides (at least those I found here) cover only automatic part and leave untouched the manual part (or extremely short and contain no pictures).

I'd like to cover such situations:

• If you have blank disk
• If your disk contains Windows installed
• If your disk contains other systems:
• If it is GPT, RAID or LVM
• If you have a OEM-preinstalled copy of Windows 8

Previously, I have installed Windows 7 on my 320 GB laptop with three partitions 173, 84 and 63 GB each. The 63 GB partition was where the Windows was installed. The rest were for file containers.

Now I changed my OS to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I installed Ubuntu by replacing the entire Windows 7 on the 63 GB partition. The rest of the partitions remain as an NTFS Windows partition and I can still access them both (the 173 and 84 GB partitions).

Now I want to change the two partitions of Windows into an Ubuntu format partitions plus most importantly, I want to extend the 63 GB partition to more than a 100 GB because at the moment I am running out of disk space. Whenever I try to install any application, especially using wine, it always complains for a shortage of disk space.

How do I do the extending activity before I entirely format my laptop again and lose all the important files on my partitions?

How can I increase the size of the root partition of a system at runtime?

I have a partition that is not allocated after the root partition (which is also ext4), how can I add that unallocated space to the space allocated to the root partition without having to shutdown the server?

As a Linux/Ubuntu newbie, what is LVM and what is it used for?

In terms of a web server installation, what benefits does it provide?

Would you recommend using it?