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My HDD is partitioned into two equal sized partitions. First is being used for Windows and Second for Ubuntu. Everything is working fine. But now I want to remove Windows and use the disk completely for Ubuntu. I can easily boot from live cd and use GParted to delete Windows partition and then expand Ubuntu partition to use the whole hard disk.

  1. I want to know if its safe
  2. Will resizing Ubuntu partition change any thing else like the partition UUID or any thing else?
  3. Do I need to reinstall grub after resizing the root partition?

It would be great if some one who has already done this can give their advice here.

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4 Answers

I want to know if its safe

Generally, operations can fail. If operations on partitions fail, it can cause data loss, so be prepared and do backups first.

Will resizing Ubuntu partition change [...] the partition UUID


Do I need to reinstall grub after resizing the root partition?


It doesn't even matter if you've installed GRUB2 into the MBR (e.g., /dev/sda, default when installing Ubuntu), or into the root partition (e.g., /dev/sda1).

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didnt work. The partition resized without error and had all the data but when I restarted the machine Ubuntu didnt boot. I then tried installing Grub to MBR. It installed okay but I guess wiped partition table as no partitions showed up after I restarted the machine after installing Grub. Gparted shows no partitions i.e unpartitioned empty drive. –  binW Jan 17 '11 at 13:23
That's both very weird. I'll try to reproduce this with a virtual machine. If you still have your disk untouched, you'll likely can recover the partitions. Boot with a live CD, download the 6.12-WIP version of TestDisk (just extract and run, nothing to compile), and follow these instructions to rewrite the partition table. –  htorque Jan 17 '11 at 13:31
I'm unable to reproduce this. I used GParted (live CD) to create a NTFS partition in the beginning (no time for installing Windows), installed Ubuntu 10.10 in the free space, used GParted (again from the live CD) to delete the NTFS partition and resize the Ubuntu partition - after a restart Ubuntu booted just fine, using all the space on the disk. :-/ –  htorque Jan 17 '11 at 14:30
My windows partition was primary but Ubuntu partition was logical. Could that be an issue? –  binW Jan 25 '11 at 10:29
@binW: as long as you resized both, the extended partition and the logical one inside, everything should work fine. I again just tested this: img.xrmb2.net/images/199787.png - no UUID change, booted just fine. –  htorque Jan 28 '11 at 9:03
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yes you can and the problem is with ubuntu being in a logical partition. just use testdisk write the partition table backup your data and install ubuntu with option to use the entire disk. that is it. i had the samr prob and solved it.

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Windows works enough (except for heavy duty games) inside a virtual machine once you've taken time to install one of the virtual machine players or virtualbox. Vbox OSE is also recommended for poking around with new installation CD's to check whether partitioning options do what you would expect. There is less motive nowadays to assign half of your hard drive to a virus swapping operating system whose rate of update churn exceeds the capacity of a good CPU core and which can do less harm while confined to its .vmdk file and switched off for most of the time.

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Yes, there is no problem with resizing root partitions. But the operation must get completed successfully. The OS will then do a disk check and everything will be fine.

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