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How can I grow my Windows partition when the unallocated space is not next to it? I am only allowed to shrink the windows partition, not expand it.

screenshot from gparted

Zanna
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  • You can only expand into adjacent unallocated. But you have your Linux partition between the Windows partition and the unallocated. You do not have a lot of room. Windows really requires about 30% free or at 10% free it gets slow and a defrag may take forever as there is no working room. Time to houseclean. You can only modify drives with live installer, so partitions are unmounted. And best to use Windows for NTFS and gparted or Linux tools for Linux partitions. – oldfred Mar 09 '17 at 16:50
  • You will have to move the sda5 partition right, so that the free space is adjacent (see https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/adjacent) to the partition you want to expand. – waltinator Mar 09 '17 at 16:51
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It's not possible to grow a partition into space that's not adjacent to it. As such, you need to move the other partitions to make the free space adjacent to it. In your case, this means moving /dev/sda5 to the "right". Once you perform this move, the free space will be adjacent to /dev/sda3 and you'll be able to grow it.