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Lately I've had space problems in my Ubuntu 20.04.5 OS (such as not showing the ui for example).

I checked my disk space and I found that I have two partitions for file systems. Is it normal? Because I have free space in one of them that isn't being used so I wonder if I can merge them and solve my space problem

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Thomas Ward
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Tomás Iglesias
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    Those are separate file systems, and you have a swap partition between them. Even if the swap partition weren't there, you wouldn't be able to merge two filesystems together. You would have to copy the data from the second partition to an external drive or media to keep a copy of it, remove the swap partition and the second partition, and then expand the first partition to fill the free space. Then you'd have to manually restore the data from the second partition from your original media. – Thomas Ward Sep 16 '22 at 19:04
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    Does this answer your question? Move separate /home partition to the default configuration /home folder – user68186 Sep 16 '22 at 19:09

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Your partition /dev/sda5 isn't unused; according to the image you provided it is mounted on /home, so any files that are placed within your home directory are actually located on that partition.

You probably set it this way during system installation, to have separate partitions for system (/) and for data (/home). This is a perfectly normal setup, but your problem is that you set your system partition too small (20 GB). It should definitely be larger - 50 GB seems a reasonable size.

You can boot from the live media you used to install the system and use GParted program to resize/move the partitions. It is recommended to have a backup of everything important while doing this, in case something goes wrong.

Merging the partitions will be a bit more complicated in your case, because:

  1. your system is already configured to use two separate partitions, as said above - you would need to change this configuration (it is done via /etc/fstab file).
  2. before attempting to merge the partitions, you should copy the entire contents of your /dev/sda5 partition to some external storage (eg. USB drive) - as you would need to delete that partition. After resizing /dev/sda3 is done, you must copy that contents back into /home directory.
  3. then you should use GParted to delete /dev/sda5, move /dev/sda4 to the end of the drive and resize /dev/sda3.
raj
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