[SOLVED]When resizing partitions, eg deleting some and increasing the size of another, is it possible/advisable to resize to the left (start) side of a partition occupied by the OS? I think I recall reading somewhere that one could resize from the tail of the partition (i.e. to the right) but not from the head. I have 6 various OS on my HDD but wish to keep only 2 or 3 without reinstalling.
I have used GParted to increase the size of a partition I wish to keep by shrinking the following partition and adding the balance to the one I wished to enlarge which was successful.
Any thoughts or advice on this would be appreciated. I have checked similar threads but nothing seems to quite fit my case.

I don't think it is important. Gparted can handle both cases.

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Post an image of the drive from GParted. The partition needs to be contiguous with unallocated space. If you are moving a partition with boot files you could have a problem.
Which Linux distribution are you using?

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I am using LMDE-2 to which I wish to allocate the bulk of my HDD at the expense of a few other distros I have loaded on various partitions when I was distro-hopping trying to find THE one.Will post shortly as Linux is on different computer.

Generally best to extend to the right, as that simply entails adding more meta-data. No (or little) data movement should be required.
When you move the start of the partition, essentially everything has to be re-located. If you gotta do it, it'll work (usually), but I try to avoid it where possible.
With UEFI, the boot issue is no longer such an issue, and with LVM, you can avoid having to touch the actual partition at all to add non-contiguous space. Options abound, it's just a matter of what's applicable at the time.

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