Hi everyone:

thanks in advance for your kind assistance and 4 bearing with me. while installing ubuntu 8.04 lts, somehow selected the wrong choices with GParted 0.3.5. from two original partitions on 'c' /dev/sda1 [ntfs, where WinXP MCE resides from factory] and /dev/sda2 [fat32, a repository to reinstall WinXP if something does go wrong] i got what i think are 2 many partitions. this situation has me scratching for a solution!

GParted now shows:

[Partition|Filesystem|Mountpoint|Size|Flags] - Used|Unused not shown

/dev/sda1--|ntfs-------|-|-57.77GiB|boot
/dev/sda4--|extended---|-|-39.14GiB|
/dev/sda5--|ext3-------|-|729.48MiB|
/dev/sda7--|ext3-------|/|-32.22GiB|
/dev/sda8--|linux-swap-|-|--1.56GiB|
/dev/sda6--|linux-swap-|-|--1.65GiB|
/dev/sda2--|fat32------|-|-13.87GiB|lba
unallocated|unallocated|-|--1.00GiB|

the intentions are: 1- to merge partitions, 2- put the unallocated "slice" to work, 3- have the bare minimum of partitions required!

thanks again to all!

You should only need one swap partition for a start. Is Ubuntu the only distro you are using? I haven't deleted one before that may have been in use, so do some googling on the matter. i'd suggest that a look at /etc/fstab will tell you which is in use. Delete the other.

I assume that /dev/sda4, as an extended partition simply encapsulates logical the partitions below it (as opposed to primary) (or at least sda5-8, perhaps 6).

From there, you should be able to move partitions to get the unalocated space where you want it an enlarge whichever you want.

This means that you'd be left with 2 partitions for Ubuntu - sda5 and 7 (short of reinstalling I think you're stuck with 2, but so what?), your ntfs partition, a fat32 (you use this for sharing?), your extended partition, one swap plus some free space to be incorporated.

This is where being on LVM pays off. But anyway:

- Disable swapping first

1. Use swapoff -a to turn all swap devices off.
2. fdisk and delete those partitions

- Delete /dev/sda5
- Create new swap device and edit /etc/fstab accordingly
- swapon the new device

How exactly would LVM help? That would require a separate root partition, and why delete the existing swap and create a new one? Use the one that's there and move it if necessary.

LVM would help in terms of management with an additional layer of abstraction...he wouldn't care how many physical partitions there are, simply merge the PVs into VGs and deal out volumes accordingly, his /etc/fstab would be cleaner for it. There's no need to put root on LVM.

As far as recreating swap, its optional...but he IS asking how to merge, so why not merge and recreate swap?

You can't put root on LVM IIRC. Abstraction isn't what LVM is about, it's about seemless management but usually of multiple physical volumes, note partitions.

What do you want him to merge? We don't know what's on /dev/sda5, so deleting that may be dangerous.

OP - can you post /etc/fstab please