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I want to use the remaining free space on my hard drive, however there's a problem:

Running cfdisk outputs:

Label: gpt, identifier: CEE38D42-DBB8-4F74-ADA6-1BC2A5E46AE1

Device                                                      Start                              End                         Sectors                          Size Type



>>  /dev/sda1                                                    2048                         41945087                        41943040                           20G Linux swap

    Free space                                               41945088                       1002151935                       960206848                        457.9G

    /dev/sda3                                              1002151936                       1002153983                            2048                            1M BIOS boot
    /dev/sda5                                              1002153984                       1003792383                         1638400                          800M EFI System
    /dev/sda6                                              1003792384                       1953525134                       949732751                        452.9G Linux filesystem

As you can see, there's 457.9G of unused free space, which I see as a waste. Therefore I am trying to combine it with my Linux filesystem partition (sda6). However, they aren't right next to each other. Is there a safe way to "move" the free space to increase the size of the sda6 partition?

DrMoishe Pippik
  • 37,887
oughy
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1 Answers1

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It is possible, though slow and arduous, to move non-adjacent partitions, such as shown by EaseUS and by HDD Tool. That process moves vasts amount of data, and the chances of error during it are significant,so make a complete drive image before you start.

However, it is trivial to make the free space a partition, and then format as you wish (ext4, btrfs, etc. for Linux only, or NTFS, FAT32, etc. to share with another OS, encrypted, or not). This can be done is seconds, with little danger (unless the wrong partition is formatted!) and you'll have another drive available for any purpose.

DrMoishe Pippik
  • 37,887