How to add free space to excluded partition
 

Hello everyone,

My computer has three primary partition (/dev/sda1, /dev/sda2 and /dev/sda3) and one extended partition (/dev/sda4) under which there are several partitions (/dev/sda5, /dev/sda6 and /dev/sda7). The rest of hard drive is not formatted, thus left as free space. Now, I would like to format part of the free space and include it as an extended partition /dev/sda8. I was trying to create a new partition from the free space with GParted, but it complained that there were already four primary partitions and I needed to get at least one of them to create a new partition. How to circumvent that since the new partition is not a primary partition anyway? Thanks.

Use gparted to enlarge the extended partition (the container) first.
Then you can create a new logical partition (/dev/sda8) within the extended.

Thanks. I finally realized I had to deactivate any partitions under the extended partition to make changes.