Hello,

So I've decided to do another fresh installment of a Linux distribution and saw there are two unallocated spaces on the same hard disk?

https://ibb.co/FWCk3Zk

How can I join the two unallocated spaces together?

Thanks!

You're messed up as a soup sammich.
Find something you may be interested in as a full time distro.
Install using whole drive and regroup to play a few days later

First : Backup of any important files on that hdd (because partition moving/resizing take its toll on the hdd and it may fail or something goes wrong and the partition get messed up).

Then - this is what I'd do in this case:

• Move sda6 to left so it's no more free space between sda7
• well, it's done .. .

You want to move sda6 to the left, in order to have a single large unallocated space. However, the "lock" icon indicates that you can't alter sda6. Perhaps this is because you are booted up to that partition. If you have a live-CD or USB install, boot up to that, and there will be no restrictions against moving sda6.

Thanks! But is it dangerous to move partitions around even on a live CD/USB install?

I was thinking about the possibility of deleting sda6 and do a fresh install of Ubuntu again, since Ubuntu is on sda6. Will that help?

Alter partitions are always dangerous, do a backup first

Yeah, as Grobe notes there is always the possibility of something going wrong. FWIW, I have used gparted to resize and move partitions a LOT over the decades, and the number of times it has gone bad for me so far is zero.

That's not to say it has all been smooth sailing. There were many times early on when it would fail to do what I wanted - like taking a Mac partition and expanding its size (it could shrink it). Or various things with NTFS partitions, which I had to boot into Windows to do. There are a lot of non-obvious restrictions on what gparted can do, although it has gotten more capable over the years.

But in all cases so far, these failures were fail-safe. Instead of doing what I wanted it to do, it just didn't do it.

If you are mentally prepared to wipe the Ubuntu install and doing a fresh install, then you could first try just moving the Ubuntu partition and see if that works. If it messes up? Just go ahead and wipe it and do a fresh install.

Alright, will do thanks!

Okay, but if something goes wrong then it will mess up the entire hard drive right?

I mean, all other existing partitions will be affected as well? Or just sda6?

If you were using the low level tools manually and you really don't know what you were doing, then it's possible for you to make a mistake that, say, wipes the entire drive instead of just the partition you intended. But gparted doesn't let you make low level mistakes like that.

I mean ... it still won't save you from yourself if you tell it to delete the wrong partition.

Of course, there's always the possibility of a disk error which screws up the partition table (and thus makes all partitions inaccessible). But this isn't really a gparted thing. It's something that can happen any time randomly. It can happen ANY TIME.

The reason I don't sweat it is because I maintain at least triplicate backups of the data I care about anyway, using rsync. I used to have a lot of hard drives go bad on me, before I understood the basic concept of cooling airflow.

Delete /dev/sda6.
Reinstall Ubuntu. It will likely want to use all the now consolidated space. If that is not what you want, you will have to resize partition(s) at the partitioner stage of the install. Best to let it use the lot given your concerns.

I don't see the problem or any reason to do anything. If you want to install another distribution, simply create a partition out of the unallocated space before sda6 and install it there. It's over 28GB which should be more than enough for a Linux install. You can then use the remaining unallocated space for a data partition or partitions.

You can't combine unallocated space that isn't contiguous. You could move sda6 to the left but really, no reason to do that.

Thank you guys for the recommendations!

I will probably do a backup and delete/reinstall Ubuntu on sda6.

I know it's counter-intuitive to have that many Linux distros installed, but I don't think using virtual machines is really that good when it comes to testing hardware support - correct me if I'm wrong though!

I'm not a great user of virtual guests.
Only backup what you care about, then go play. That's how you learn.

Okay thanks!

Alright so I'm going to go ahead and try to resize partitions (already did backup)!

Is it really necessary to do that from a live-CD or can I do it from Ubuntu using GParted as long as I'm not booted up to such partitions about to be resized?

Are there any increased/decresed risks associated with doing such operation from a live-CD Vs. OS?