November 2006, 17th

GETTING FREE SPACE
TO GROW-UP A PARTITION
The first thing you need to understand is that you can't use non-contiguous free space !
Have a look at the following picture :
start
As you can see, we have many unused space in hda5 ! So we are going to shrink hda5 :
shrink hda5
shrink hda5 - 2
We have now free space in the extended partition, hda2 ! So we can move hda5 from the beginning to the end of hda2 :
moving hda5
moving hda5 - 2
Now we are able to shrink hda2, and get free space in front of hda2 :
free space
free space - 2
So it is time to grow up hda1 :
free space - 3
growing up hda1
At the end, we have grown up hda1 with free space we took from hda5 !
hda1 grown up
 In this example, we have worked with NTFS ! IF YOU WORK WITH NTFS, YOU NEED TO REBOOT AND LET THE SYTEM CHECK FOR CONSISTENCY, before doing anything else ! It will reboot at least one time !