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In 18.04.5 I have a 128Gb SSD which was formatted solely for Ubuntu.

The disks table appears thus:

enter image description here

indicating an EFI File System partition of 537Mb and a single partition (Partition 2) of 127Gb Ext4.

On a newly installed 20.04.1 PC with a (similar) 128Gb SSD, after tinkering with the additional partition options, I seem to have managed to achieve 2 partitions after the 537Mb FAT - an extended Partition 2 of 127Gb and a Partition 5 127Gb Ext 4 thus:

enter image description here

Other than perhaps starting the installation process from the start, is there a way I can reconfigure this drive or is it of little or no consequence?

What I was trying to achieve was to exploit the whole of the volume (all 128Gb) to Ubuntu. Is this indeed possible and if not, what steps should be taken to mount the second partition to take advantage of the whole volume?

graham
  • 13,061

1 Answers1

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It's about partition table type and understanding extended partitions.

You use different partition tables on the two disks, while the first disk has GPT partition table, the second disk uses MBR.

The MBR partition table is the old standard, it's disadvantage was always that it can hold only 4 partition table entries, thus one could not create more than 4 partitions.

To go around this limitation, extended partitions have been introduced, one of the four partitions (also called primary partitions) can be divided in "sub-partitions", also called logical partitions.

In your case, the extended partition holds only one logical partition which has the same size as the extended partition, so your space is fully used.

With GPT you have only primary partitions, GPT does not have extended partitions. If you want to convert your MBR-disk to GPT, you can do so, but it's not really neccessary. The answers to [this question] show how this can be done (since you have grub installed in your Efi System Partition, you may skip the part about installing grub). Alternatively one could opt for a fresh install, then one should prepare the disk in advance with Gparted to create a new GPT partition table.

You also can leave everything as it is, it's a working configuration, there will be no difference in performance.

mook765
  • 18,644