Hi all-

I shrunk down one partition on an external drive and now I want to extend another; I'm in GParted, I've formatted partitions sdb1 and sdb3 to ext4 format, but when I try and extend sdb1 it doesn't give me the ability to do that.

A screenshot's attached; is there anything that anyone can see or think of that'd be obvious to most that I'm clearly missing here? Any assistance is appreciated, thanks!

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As I can see in the screenshot, it is not possible to extend sdb1, since there is no space left above sdb1.

/dev/sdb1 can not be extended because there's no room to extend to.
208.66 + 68.39 + 188.71 = 465.76 That's the total size of the hard drive.

there still seems to be /dev/sdb2, an NTFS (=Windows) partition, which is also still mounted.
If you are 300 percent sure you don't need that anymore, then you can unmount it and delete it - only after that can you expand one of the other partitions.

But, like gparted is also telling you, this is not a trivial thing to do, there's no guarantee that you don't lose data if there's e.g. a power outage, so you should have a backup, and it takes a long time.

Also it might be advisable to reboot after completing such an operation - and, if one of the altered partitions contains your system boot stuff, there's even a chance that your system won't boot; but that's only a small, solvable annoyance.

I should be more clear; how might i 'combine' the two non-NTFS partitions to become one large partition? That's what i meant by extend, wrong verbiage....

This is an external drive, so no worries about the laptop not booting. The NTFS partition has a Win10 build for Virtualbox; i suppose i could move it, format the whole drive, and start again, but i figured I'd see if i could combine the ext4's into one without doing that.

Combining partitions is near impossible. You could theoretically use software to effectively mount them at the same spot, but that wouldn't be worth it IMHO.

You can't combine them when there's a third partition splitting them down the middle.

You could delete the second one, move the NTFS partition to the end of the drive, then expand the first one to fill the available space, but it would take a very long time and would be very risky. You'd be better off just backing up and reinstalling/repartitioning from scratch.

What I would do (by no means the only option):
Copy everything from the NTFS partition to a separate disk.
Mount both ext4 partitions, copy the files from sdb3 to sdb1
Unmount all three, then delete sdb2 and sdb3
Extend sdb1 as big as you want it
Create a new NTFS at the end and copy the files back.

I think it would be better to copy all relevant data to an external disk.
Then delete all partitions on the mentioned disk. Create the new ones.
Copy all data back.

Yeah, that's what i ended up doing. It's a fine line between clever and stupid, figured I'd just do the easy thing and learn better for next time

Next time, I think three times before posting anything.