Best way to move a system to a larger HDD.

[Frank616]

OK, I think I got this figured out....

I was not familiar with the way Linux works with a logical rather than a primary partition. It appears that I have a primary partition for Windows (sda1), and I have a second primary partition that has been converted to an Extended primary partition, or a just plain Extended partition (sda2). Inside of sda2, I have sda5, which holds my Linux filesystem and Kubuntu 12.04 installation. sda2 is effectively just a container IIUC.

I extended sda2 first off to use the whole of the 130.22 GB available, effectively eliminating the 5.33 GB swap partition that I had previously unallocated. Once that was done, I could now extend sda2 yet again to within 4 GB of the end of the disk. Once that was done, I then extended sda5 inside of sda2 until it was all used up. The remaining 4 GB becomes my swap. Not the best place for swap, but it works.

I'd probably have been better just reinstalling. However, I learned a few things, and my machine now works.

Frank.

[Snowhog]

sda2 is effectively just a container IIUC.

That is correct. The 'extended' partition is a container within which you create 'logical' partitions. As you have less than four 'primary' partitions (if you had four primary partitions, you would not be able to create an extended partition), the first logical partition will be number 5: sda5 here.

[Frank616]

Snowhog:

That is correct. The 'extended' partition is a container within which you create 'logical' partitions.

That is what threw me. I was trying to find a way to amalgamate the free space INSIDE sda2 with the unallocated free space at the end of the disk. I didn't realize that the free space at the end of the disk had to be taken into sda2 before I could extend sda5 to use it. Now I get it.

Anyway, all is well. Steve's earlier post on how to clone the drive worked very well, and I preserved everything that I needed to. I got GParted to give me one big chunk of storage for Kubuntu 12.04, and I lost no data in the process. On top of all of that, I learned something! It was a good couple of days.

Frank.