Unable to resize (enlarge) Linux partition

Question

I want to increase the size of my Linux partition (yellow and highlighted in image), which is situated in an extended partition, along with my biggest partition.

When I try to select the options from any partitioning software (EASUS, Paragon, Gparted) the option to resize is not available (or can't enlarge).

For example in the Paragon Hard Disk Manager, I can't add free space before the partition, even if I first shrink the "G:" partition, then try to enlarge the one with Linux.

Do you know what's happening here? Why am I not allowed to resize the partition?

Answer 1

I couldn't tell you for sure why you are not able to resize you partition (perhaps it thinks the drive is somehow in use?), but I can tell you what you can try to do to resize it some other way.

In my experience, drives are a lot more cooperative when you're not running something off of them. So what I would do is download a Linux Live CD of some kind that has a partitioning tool and boot to it and partition the drive from there. The GParted Live CD would probably be my choice of Live CD for this kind of thing, but most Linux Live CDs will work for this as long as they come with GParted or another partitioning tool.

All you need to to do is burn the disk image to a CD and then boot to it, and use GParted to try and resize the partition. If that still doesn't solve your problem, then try posting the output of sudo fdisk -l (that's a lowercase "L") at a Linux command line and a description of what is on each partition and maybe that'll give us some clues to the problem.

Answer 2

It's very simple, and should be obvious from the nice graphic at the bottom of the very window you are looking at. You cannot re-size that partition because there is no free space following it to extend it into. You need to move the target partition so that the free space, following the preceding partition, instead follows the one that you want to re-size. There are plenty of partitioning utilities that run on Windows that are capable of moving ("sliding") partitions, from Acronis Disk Director through EASEUS Partition Master to what you have: Paragon Partition Manager.