Creating partitions for multiple operating systems

Question

I changed my old 120GB harddrive to a new 320GB harddrive. I am using multiple booting, I have two OS: Windows 7 and Ubuntu. My laptop's partitioning table:

1. System reserved, 100MB (Windows 7), NTFS, Primary
2. Windows 7 itself, 93,15GB, NTFS, Primary
3. Logical, ext4:
   • SWAP, 2GB
   • Ubuntu itself, 16,63GB
4. Unallocated 186,30GB

I want to resize both OS partitions so that both partitions would have ~150GB size.

Is it possible? I have tried Gparted and EASEUS Partition Master, but couldn't succeed.

Answer 1

Resize a Partition for Free in Windows 7 or Vista

Click the above link for pictures.

Windows 7 and Vista include a built-in functionality in Disk Management to shrink and expand partitions. No more 3rd party utilities needed!

To get to this utility, open up Control Panel, and type in partition into the search box.. you’ll immediately see the link show up:

Extend (enlarge) a Partition:

In the Disk Management screen, just right-click on the partition that you want to shrink, and select “Extend Volume” from the menu.

On this screen, you can specify the amount that you want to increase the partition by.

Answer 2

Using gparted (I prefer the gparted Linux Live CD/USB) you can resize your partitions.

The trick is doing the changes in order, something like this:

• Resize the Ubuntu partition, but take care of leaving the empty space before the partition (not after)
• Move the swap partition in the same way, leave the empty space before the partition.
• Now, you should be able to grow your windows partition to the desired size.

This method works (I have just do the same thing last night) but is slow since gparted has to grow and then move the Ubuntu partition on disk, so it has to copy all the data in the partition (16Gb)

Best regards.