Resize root partition

Question

Hello there people of the internet,

I'm currently running Windows 10 and Elementary OS as dual boot. My root partition is about 12GB large and I'm starting to run into storage issues. Since my home partition is over 100GB big I thought it'd be good a idea to take some amount off of that and enlarge my root.

https://i.sstatic.net/gsTh2.png

or

Model: ATA Samsung SSD 750 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 250GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End     Size    File system     Name                          Flags
 1      1049kB  17,8MB  16,8MB                  Microsoft reserved partition  msftres
 2      17,8MB  125GB   125GB   ntfs            Basic data partition          msftdata
 3      125GB   137GB   12,0GB  ext4
 4      137GB   141GB   4000MB  linux-swap(v1)
 5      141GB   250GB   109GB   ext4
 6      250GB   250GB   1049kB                                                bios_grub


Model: ATA ST1000DM003-1SB1 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 1000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name                          Flags
 1      17,4kB  633GB   633GB                LDM data partition
 2      633GB   634GB   538MB   fat32        EFI System Partition          boot, esp
 5      634GB   1000GB  366GB   ext4
 3      1000GB  1000GB  1049kB               LDM metadata partition
 4      1000GB  1000GB  133MB   fat16        Microsoft reserved partition  msftres


Model: General USB Flash Disk (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdc: 16,0GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
 1      1049kB  16,0GB  16,0GB  primary  fat32        boot, lba

The disk in question is the first one, the SSD.

Everything up to and including /dev/sda2 is my Windows stuff. Then comes the root, the swap, home and I think the last one should be boot. I've tried resizing sda5 so there's free space behind it, but as I've found out, I can't use that for my root partition since it's not adjacent to it. Resizing sda5 so that there's free space before it 1) gives me a warning that the partition might be unusable after that and 2) probably wouldn't help either since the swap partition is between root and sda5.

Now I'd like to ask you for help. How can I make my root partition bigger? I'd prefer to take space away from sda5, since over 100GB is probably way more than I could ever use up on linux, but other solutions are obviously welcome as well.

EDIT: Since I haven't found a solution yet I'm probably going to reinstall elemetaryOS completely and this time make sure to make the root partition larger. I'd still like to find an alternative but I have about 500MB left on root so right now I'm not seeing another option

Answer 1

Your intuition is right, reinstalling the OS is probably the easiest way out. You have already made your /home partition separate so as long as you create the same username on the reinstall and point it to your existing /home partition, it should be super straight forward. As you mention, just be sure to give the root partition 15GB (if not 20GB or 30GB).

If you're feeling adventurous, this is what I would try:

1. backup your data (and not just in your install, any critical data on this drive)
2. resize/reduce your /home partition by 20-30GB
3. create/format a new ext4 partition to hold a clone of your existing install in the 20-30GB freespace

4. use a tool like clone-ubuntu.sh to perform the clone (UPDATE: there seems to be a bug in "rsync -x" that doesn't make it skip your mounted /home partition. the workaround is to add "home/*" to the list of excludes in the script)

   --exclude={/dev/*,/proc/*,/sys/*,/tmp/*,/run/*,/mnt/*,/media/*,/lost+found,/home/*}

5. verify you can boot to the clone (if your clone gets stuck on boot, this fix to update permissions of yr clone's root directory might work)

6. delete your old install
7. reallocate the freespace (perhaps extend your Win10 partition as you seem to be using up the space well)

I admittedly made mistakes using the script along the way (because I was using the script to migrate my install from HDD to SDD and it turns out the script is to clone installs to the same drive and thankfully didn't lose any data in the process - just lots of failed boots which I eventually was able to fix and learned a lot about the low-level pinnings of Linux!)

The only other thing I would watch out for is maintaining your dual-boot configuration. but I feel if you got as far as getting dual-boot to work, you're good.

and if cloning doesn't work out for you, toss your old install and/or clone and install a fresh Elementary OS you intended.

good luck!