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So I currently have an inconvenient partition config on my win7/ubuntu system. what i wanna do is to have the extended sdb3 moved ajar like in the screenshot to later add a swap and home partition (latter is on another drive).

Despite the easy sounding explanation here How can I expand a partition into non adjacent free space using GParted? gparted only allows me to put a copy (sdb4) of sdb5 to the desired location. i already tried desperately to make that copy boot-able (UUID in grub) for hours with no progress so far so i am open for any input.

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maxwhere
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    You can't move sdb5 outside of the sdb3 extended partition that contains it. Move sdb3 instead and sdb5 will come with it. – Elder Geek Oct 20 '16 at 21:47
  • Wont you wind up with two filesystems with the same UUID that way? Probably confuses grub. Try using the device /dev/sdb4 instead of the uuid. – ubfan1 Oct 20 '16 at 22:56
  • It's unclear to me what you're asking. It's easy enough to add logical partitions inside an extended partition; you should be able to shrink and move /dev/sdb5 to add new partitions, if that's what you want. The main caveat is that the partition(s) you modify cannot be active, so you must do this from an emergency disk (USB drive, CD-R, etc.), not from the installation you want to modify. If you need to convert between primary and logical partitions, look into my FixParts, which can do this job. – Rod Smith Oct 21 '16 at 13:26

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What you're trying to do is to move the water without moving the glass it's in, so just move the glass and the water will follow!

Move the left edge of /dev/sdb3 (the glass) to the left and then move /dev/sdb5 (the water) to the left edge! :-)

And that's why they're both coloured blue...

Fabby
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  • You can't just move the extended partition (/dev/sdb3). You must grow it to occupy all the unpartitioned space on its left, then move the /dev/sdb5 inside it to the left border of the extended partition and then shrink that one again by moving its right border. – Byte Commander Oct 21 '16 at 21:55