Recovery partition at the middle of disk

Question

I own a Samsung laptop, which came with Windows 8 preinstalled, it was updated to Windows 10. Then I installed Ubuntu, to do it I created 4 partitions, swap, boot, root, and home. But linux ran out of space, so I shrank the C: unit in order to resize linux partitions. But I have my partitions in this order:

• sda1 NTFS (Windows Recovery) 500 MiB
• sda2 FAT32 (EFI system) 300 MiB
• sda3 (MSR) 128 MiB
• sda4 NTFS (Windows C:) 250 GiB
• 151.68 GiB Free
• sda10 (linux swap) 4.88 GiB
• sda5 NTFS (Recovery) 813 MiB
• sda9 ext4 (/boot) 977 MiB
• sda11 ext4 (/) 9.54 GiB
• sda12 ext4 (/home) 24.51 GiB
• sda6 NTFS (Recovery) 350 MiB
• sda7 NTFS (Samsung-REC2) 21.16 GiB
• sda8 FAT32 (Samsung_REC) 1 GiB

So I realized I cant resize my linux partitions without moving the recovery partition, however, I'm afraid the partition won't be recognized or won't be useful if i move it, i plan to move it towards the bottom of the disk, behind /home partition, but linux partitions will also be moved. What should i do?

EDIT: A gparted screenshot

Answer 1

I don't really know whether it is safe to move the recovery partition or not, so I understand your concern. If I had to guess I would say it is possible, but don't quote me.

In case you don't get more useful answer, you may consider this scenario:

1. Boot some live CD Linux.
2. Create a new partition in free space. The plan is: this will be your new /home. Create filesystem. Mount under /mnt/target.
3. Mount sda12 as /mnt/source; mount sda11 as /mnt/ubuntu.
4. Copy the data from source to target with sudo cp -a. Be careful not to get /mnt/target/source/ structure. It is uncommon to have hidden directories or files directly under /home/, nevertheless check if you have them.
5. Adjust /mnt/ubuntu/etc/fstab (save a copy just in case!) to use your new partition instead the old one as Ubuntu /home.
6. Check if all your data from source is in target.
7. Check again.
8. You may boot your Ubuntu to verify if it starts with the new /home. Again -- check if all your data is there. Go back to live CD then.
9. Destroy sda12.
10. Expand sda11.

This way you will get about 150 GB for /home and about 34 GB for /.

Additional hints:

• If you want to expand swap (sda10), do it beforehand.
• The scenario requires some knowledge about /etc/fstab. You may find the blkid command useful while editing the fstab.