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I have a laptop with 2 drives.

  • SSD, 512 GB, windows installed
  • HDD, 1TB, I split this one 700GB/200GB for my ubuntu dual boot a long time ago

Below is a screenshot of my partitions on my 1TB drive.

Gparted Screenshot

You can see that my / partition has 20 gigs size and my /home partition has 200 gigs. I'm planning to switch to ubuntu for the majority of my work now and I'd like to extend it's storage capacity to at 400gb by shrinking /dev/sda3 to 500gb.

Questions:

  • I have 20gb on my / partition. What data does this partition contain? Is this enough? If I install more software under my user account (non root), will I need to extend this?
  • How do I extend my partition? /dev/sda3 seems to be under the ntfs (windows type) file system, how can I merge this with /dev/sda7, which is linux?
  • What is linux-swap and why does it occupy 15 gigs of space?

Help would be appreciated!

~Shrey J.

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I have 20gb on my / partition. What data does this partition contain?

Everything except for your home directory (/home, including /home/<yourUsername> also known as ~). Your home directory is where your documents and program settings go.

Is this enough?

That's subjective. I'd consider giving it some more breathing room.

If I install more software under my user account (non root), will I need to extend this?

Yes. All software goes to this partition in your configuration.

/dev/sda3 seems to be under the ntfs (windows type) file system, how can I merge this with /dev/sda7, which is linux?

You can't, filesystems cannot be merged. There's barely any data on the NTFS partition though. You can shrink it. Don't delete it - it looks like it's used by the logical disk manager (I'm not familiar with how this works).

What is linux-swap and why does it occupy 15 gigs of space?

It's an equivalent of Windows's page file. When you run out of RAM, the OS starts to move less used parts of RAM to disk, into the swap. You have added this yourself, because modern versions of Ubuntu use swap files rather than swap partitions, and the partitioning tool certainly wouldn't create two non-adjacent swap partitions with weird sizes. You can probably safely reduce it to a single 8 GB partition, but make sure to deactivate the other one before deleting it.

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  • In that case would it be smarter to reinstall linux but this time install both / and /home under a single partition with 400gb? I don't have that much data on my ubuntu rn.
    – Shrey Joshi
    Commented Dec 7, 2020 at 7:08
  • If you don't have a reason to use separate /home, don't. It adds no value for most people. If you don't have any valuable data on the NTFS partition and there's no Windows installation on that PC, you could start completely from scratch by removing all existing partitions.
    – gronostaj
    Commented Dec 7, 2020 at 8:06
  • I completely formatted my hdd drive and removed grub. Now I have a default windows bootloader. I read online that having separate / and /home partition can speed up some things. Will this make a significant difference?
    – Shrey Joshi
    Commented Dec 8, 2020 at 8:17
  • Please show me your sources. I can't think of any reason why separate /home would improve performance.
    – gronostaj
    Commented Dec 8, 2020 at 8:23

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