I have a question regarding disk partitions on a computer that I recently acquired from work:
This laptop only runs Ubuntu. I've contacted an admin at work and they don't know anything about this computer - apparently everything on it (apart from what I've added, of course) is exactly the way it was when it arrived from Lenovo, so the sizes and specifications of the partitions I describe below were what the laptop shipped with.
When I open the Disks app, I see three partitions:
- "EFI System Partition 1"
- "PQSERVICE Partition 2"
- "Filesystem Partition 3"
- And then "Free Space."
As you'll see in the screenshot I've linked to below, I've got oodles of free space that are going unused. Based on the research I've done that I can understand, the partition that I want to expand is "Filesystem Partition 3" (which is 58 GB and has 39 GB free).
Screenshot of disk space:
I saw, in this article, that expanding disk partitions is a common issue. But is the method outlined here the only or the best way to go about it? I have a few questions in regards to the process, especially since that article was written in 2017 and things may have changed since then:
- Is "Filesystem Partition 3" actually the partition that I want to expand? This seems to be the partition where all my documents and applications 'live' (I'm guessing this is what is meant by 'root') and, rather than that paltry 58 GB being eaten up, I'd like to be able to save documents, files, and applications to a bigger space.
- It seems that 'Disks' has an option to resize any given partition. I've clicked on that option for 'Filesystem Partition 3' and it seems like it will indeed resize the partition so that I can use much more of the 961 GB of free space. This looks like it can be accomplished in a straightforward way, by dragging sliders to adjust the size of the partition. But is this actually how I can/should resize the partition? Or should I be doing this in the Terminal, as the author of the article linked above outlines?
- If this is something I should be doing in Terminal, is the process outlined in that link advisable, or is there a better (or easier) way to do so?
- If I resize the partition, should I expect to lose everything? Obviously I will back up my files before resizing so I don't lose any data, but can I expect to lose Ubuntu itself as well?
The question on these boards that seems to most closely resemble mine is this one, but the answer here suggests using something called gparted. This question was asked in 2016, so is this a function that Disks now performs, or would I still need to use gparted?
