Have used the Win7 side only twice, once to make the back up disk images for the system, and then because I needed to use GoToWebinar, so was easiest to use it than the try to get it working on the VM of XP in there.

Would have been best to simply make a link to the Gentoo partition, and used that space, which is what I do with my laptop and it's unused Win7 partition. Yes partitions often do not move, you can shrink them, or grow them, but in general moving them does, as the partition manager says, run the risk of data loss. If I try 'sudo mount -t ext4 /dev/sdd5 ~/mnt_tst/sdd5' it doesn't mount with the error 'wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdd5, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.' Now what? No idea why is so instead of being seen as ext4, how it was before moving it. Ubuntu 2018 (from yet another HDD) sees the whole disk /dev/sdd/ as one big piece the size of the entire disk when looked with Gparted (a single partition zfs filesystem - I thought it was Ext4) - Ubuntu 2018 'Disks' sees the other 4 partitions OK (those other 4 can be mounted, too), but /dev/sdd5 is listed as ZFS member, and automount doesn't work. So far I've 'dd'-ed the entire /dev/sdd disk to a file on another HDD as a crude backup. downloaded the latest Kubuntu 20.04 LTS iso image - dd the iso to an USB stick - boot from the USB into the live version - used the default GUI partition manager 'KDE Partition Manager' to resize the two partition from the hard disk On that disk (/dev/sdd) there were 5 partitions: - /dev/sdd1 - FAT32 - boot partition - /dev/sdd2 - FAT16 - EFI partition - /dev/sdd3 - Linux swap - /dev/sdd4 - Ext4 - the other OS partition (for Gentoo, the one to shrink) - /dev/sdd5 - Ext4 - the main OS partition (for Kubuntu, the one that got damaged) Steps that went well - shrink the sdd4 partition Steps that ended in error - moving the sdd5 to the left, so to start where the now smaller sdd4 ends Steps not yet performed - enlarge moved sdd5 to occupy all the empty space up to the end of the disk I let the move sdd5 step to run overnight, and in the morning the message was the move step ended in an error. On the main disk there were two Linux installations, each with its own partition, and wanted to shrink the least used OS partition, then to grow the size of the main OS partition (Kubuntu 20.04 LTS).

Kde partition manager