How to expand my extended partition?

[Carl Spitzer]

gparted the bootable CD.
no toolkit should be without it.

On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 17:21 +0000, bill purvis wrote:
> Hi,
> When I installed Ubuntu on my machine, I allocated several partitions
> including two within an extended partition. I now need to create additional
> partitions on this disk, but for some reason the extended partition has
> been truncated to the size of the two partitions contained within it.
> When I did the partitioning I explicitly specified the whole of the
> remaining area for the extended partition!
> 
> There's plenty of free space for the extra partitions, but all the
> primary slots are occupied and the two partitions within the extended
> partition are /var and /usr so I can't just delete and re-allocate.
> I've tried Gparted (the GNOME Partition Editor) and fdisk (the old
> faithful) and neither will allow me to extend the extended partition. 
> 
> There was a time when I would have written a bit of code to patch the
> partition table, but I'm older and wiser now, and less confident of
> my abilities in this area. Does anyone know of anything that can
> safely extend my extended partition back to cover all the remaining area
> without disturbing the contents? Then I can use Gparted to allocate the
> required space.....
> 
> Many thanks,
> 
> Bill
> -- 
> +---------------------------------------+
> | Bill Purvis, Amateur Mathematician    |
> |  email: bil at beeb.net                  |
> |  http://bil.members.beeb.net          |
> +---------------------------------------+
> 
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