This tutorial will show a basic method to resize and shrink hard disk drive partitions and filesystems that can be practiced for any computer as well as laptop. You will need an Ubuntu Livecd which GParted software is available built-in either in form of a DVD or USB flash drive to do so. Our way to explain this is by using examples of C, D, and E drives and comic pictures with the hope of you can follow it easily. Now let's learn and practice.

 

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Enlarging [C] Disk Drive

To make the capacity larger to C partition, it requires an unallocated space next to it. This means there are two choices to do partition enlargement:

First choice is when there is an enough unallocated space next to C partition:


1. Select C Disk Drive.
2. Right-click > Resize/Move.
3. A dialog will show.
4. Enter new bigger size in number to New Size box. For example, if current C is 5000 MiB, and you want to enlarge it to 10000 MiB (twice its size), then delete 5000 and fill in 10000, as long as the new size is not larger than the what the unallocated can provide.
5. Click Resize/Move.
6. The dialog will close and a new job of Grow will show on main window with a new unallocated will show under the selected partition. This is not yet applied.
7. Click Apply button.
8. Click Apply/OK.
9. GParted will show Applying pending operations for a while. Wait for it to finish.
11. Click Close.

First choice finished. 

Second choice is when there is no unallocated space next to the C partition. In this case, you must either delete neighboring partition or shrinking it to make an unallocated space.

1. Select a neighboring partition next to C.
2. Shrink it to make enough unallocated space. See Shrinking section below.
3. Unallocated space created next to C.
4. Enlarge C using explained method above.
5. The C partition enlarged.