How to move free space from the middle of a disk with Gnome Disks or blivet-gui
I used to dual boot Windows and Fedora 35, and decided to just run windows in a vm. I deleted the Windows partitions successfully, but now I have free space in the middle that I can’t figure out how to move safely.
Since I don’t have a swap partition, this question doesn’t help, and since the partitions are on the same disk, I can’t use this question.
I don’t want to use GParted because it’s not installed on my Fedora live usb (and other unrelated reasons), so my options are Gnome Disks and blivet-gui. Is there a way to safely move the free space from the middle of nowhere to my main partition?
Print lsblk
Return mountpoint for fedora_localhost-live (nvme0n1p6).
$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
zram0 252:0 0 8G 0 disk [SWAP]
nvme0n1 259:0 0 476.9G 0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 100M 0 part /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p5 259:2 0 1G 0 part /boot
└─nvme0n1p6 259:3 0 350.9G 0 part /home
/
Many thanks!!
You can’t "move" free space. It also doesn’t solve anything! You’d still need to tell your / filesystem to use that.
However, your filesystem that you want to extend is btrfs – perfect! You can just add more partitions to the btrfs volume to extend its size, no need to move anything. And since this is an ssd and not a spinning disk, this also has no performance downside at all.
It’s quite doable:
- Use blivet-gui to add a new partition that uses up your free space. Don’t format it!
- Note down the name of that position, e.g., nvme0n1p42.
- Add the new space to your existing volume:
sudo btrfs device add /dev/nvme0n1p42 /
That’s it! You can use the new space right away.