Based on your partition map, sda4
is your extended partition and sda6
and sda5
seem to be logical
partitions within it.
Now, since you already have 4 primary partitions (including sda4
, which is considered so too), you cannot define a new primary partition. Shrinking sda1
to split it is going to fail for this reason.
You have a couple of simple options to pick from.
(all of them are based on getting more space in your extended
partition).
- Shrink your data partition
sda6
to create more logical partitions.
You can install unix based systems on these logical partitions, things like GRUB
can handle this.
- Kill or move-out your unix partitions (
sda3
and sda6
) and then restructure your disk.
- This implies you either backup your unix data to be restored in a fresh install or backup entire partition image to be restores (provided you have some experience doing that).
- If you do this, you will have an intermediate state where
sda1
and sda2
would be the only useful partitions on your system.
- At such time, you can also go ahead to shrink your
sda2
and release more free space into unallocated area (you would have already deleted the other partitions).
- Now, you can create a single extended partition of all available free space and start with new partitions within it where you will reinstall or recover your primary unix partition (which is
sda3
now) and then add in other unix systems as you choose.
Remember, you can share a single swap
partition across all your unix systems. This is because you won't be running more than one at a time and that running system can use the common swap
partition. The swap
partition has no persistent data across reboots.
When you boot into Unix, try the command "sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda
".
It will dump your partition table with the sda4
described as Extended
and its Start
and End
range will encompass that of the remaining (sda6
and sda5
) logical partitions. This Extended
partition is also counted as a primary partition
.