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I am running Ubuntu Karmic Koala on my laptop for the last 5+ months. Initially when I installed ubuntu, I did a dual boot. I was skeptical about my transition to ubuntu so just gave 13ish gigs to my ubuntu box (can't remember the memory I assigned). However, as it stands, I've been loving the transition and have not gone to windows in last 5 months.

Now the problem is that I have only some Megs of HD space left and I think because of this, my ubuntu box is running extremely slow. Even minimizing and maximizing windows takes time, if I have lot of tabs open on chrome then things tend to slow down ..etc..etc

What is the best way for me to just increase the HD space assigned to my ubuntu partition or completely wipe down the windows partition and let current ubuntu partition take over the whole HD. At the same time, I do not want to lose any of the settings or work on my current ubuntu partition.

What is the best way to get through this? Any tutorials I should follow?

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will surely do :) Don't get to visit SuperUser often. ....Done – Omnipresent Apr 26 '11 at 14:11
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migrated from serverfault.com Apr 26 '11 at 13:48

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2 Answers

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The easiest way to do this is use something like the GParted LiveCD.

Burn yourself a CD and boot up the system using that. This way the drive is not in use and the partitioner is free to make changes. You can edit your partition tables including re-sizing and removing partitions.

Be aware that if you change the partition sequences you might need to make changes to your boot loader before the system will boot! If your windows partition is before your linux ones and you delete it, and your boot loader is hard coded with the location to look for linux, you will have to manually edit that file before the system will boot again. You can do this live from most bootloaders like grub or lilo, or you can use another linux livecd to boot and edit the config file. Lastly, your /etc/fstab file in Ubuntu might need updating if it uses disk partition numbers. If it uses UUID's you are good to go.

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some of those steps sound tricky. Will backup first as well – Omnipresent Apr 26 '11 at 14:15
Always backup, but just re-sizing partitions shouldn't cause too much complaining; it's the removing one and thus changing the order that might raise eyebrows. It's also possible that you have UUID based partitions in both grub and Ubuntu so it won't care. – Caleb Apr 26 '11 at 14:17
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up vote 1 down vote

You can also recover some space by doing a sudo rm /var/cache/apt/archives/* which will clean the apt-get archives. This should help you in the short run, a more permanent solution would be the one suggested by Caleb.

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good suggestion. – Omnipresent Apr 26 '11 at 14:19
The "right" way to do this is to run apt-get clean, as far as I can tell. It's also easier to remember, I think. – Eduardo I. Apr 26 '11 at 16:17
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