My drive is a 160GB and currently having 2 partitions:

• swap (taking about 2 GB)
• linux (taking about 155GB)

Here's the fdisk -l
I'd like to do the following:

1. Increase the swap partition to 5GB
2. Reduce the Linux system partition by 25GB and give this 25GB to a new partition, which I'd like to use for my Data - this should be accessible by both Linux & Windows

Thanks in advance for any help and suggestions.

Something like gparted may be useful to you.

Typically you would run it from a live CD, and use it to non-destructively change the size of your partitions (though you should always back up before repartitioning, it is an inherently risky process).

For a partition shared between Windows and Linux, people have typically used an FAT32 format. However, NTFS support in Linux has become much more reliable in the last few years. You may encounter some issues because the two operating systems have different ways of handling file ownership and permissions.

I think you would also need to reinstall the portion of GRUB that is in the MBR. I'm not certain of this. Maybe someone who knows more will comment on that aspect.

A small part of GRUB (or LILO or GRUB2 or whatever you are using to boot) resides in the MBR. That must be able to find the next stage of the boot code that resides in sda2. When the beginning of sda2 moves, I think that breaks the information stored in the MBR when GRUB was installed so that part of GRUB must be reinstalled to once again be able to find sda2.

There is no reason to move sda2. linux can use multiple swap partitions and/or swap files.
Shrinking sda2 and creating two addition partition would be the easiest and as already suggest it would be best running gparted from a live CD.

I booted with the LiveCD and went to gparted from where I did the following:
-Reduced size of /sda2 by 28GB (25GB for the new data partition and 3GB to add to the swap partition)
-Moved /sda2 to the right by 3GB
-Made a new 25GB primary partition for the data partition

but could not increase the size of the swap partition. The move/resize option was greyed out.
How would I go about with this, pls?

IDK for sure but two ideas come to mind.

Firstly was the LiveCD using the swap partition? swapon -s can be used to display the active swap partitions. The swapoff command can be used to de-activate swap partitions.

Secondly I have had mixed results with gparted so now prefer to use fdisk and/or cfdisk. These are less fully featured than gparted but this is not relevant for a swap partition which you can simply delete and recreate; they should be available on the LiveCD

do any of these have graphical front-ends? Iḿ not very comfy with command-line apps.

Yes, Gparted is a fully graphical tool, based on the parted library. See post #2 for the link to the Gparted site @ sourceforge, which will probably have a link where you can download the standalone ISO of Gparted too, which you can burn to a disc and boot it up, and use that to do your partition editing.

Sasha

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I think you're chasing details in the bad part of catkin's advice.

You already know how to use Gparted from a liveCD. That is a perfectly good GUI tool for your purposes. Switching to fdisk or cfdisk wouldn't help.

The better part of catkin's advice was:
From the problem you described we can be nearly certain that the liveCD was using the swap partition on the hard drive, so that partition cannot be resized.

To solve that, you need to make the liveCD session not use the swap space. The swapoff command can be used after booting into the liveCD to tell it not to use the swap space.

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Booted the system from the PC/OS LiveCD and loaded Gparted from there, "switched off" swap on for the swap partition and then successfully resized it.

Thanks everyone.