Too many partitions; is there any solution?

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

I have a dual-booting Windows10/OpenSuse machine. Recently I noticed a series of problems in Windows, many of which might indicate a problem with the hard disk. Although that’s impossible to say for sure, just to be on the safe side I decided to buy a new HD and transfer everything there. I used Clonezilla for the transferral, and it did an amazing job. Once I had cloned my original disk to the new disk, and replaced the old one with the new one, everything is working like absolutely nothing has changed. I was amazingly surprised that the transferral went without any problem whatsoever.

Of course there is one thing that has changed: The old HD was 500GB, while this new one is 1TB. That means that there’s half terabyte of unused space in this disk. It would obviously be nice to get that extra space.

Problem is, when I try to create a new partition on that unused space in Windows, it complains “you cannot create a new volume in this unallocated space because the disk already contains maximum number of partitions”.

I don’t know why there are so many primary partitions on the disk. According to the disk manager, it seems that Windows has created two primary partitions (the main partition, and some partition reserved by the system), and Linux apparently has created three primary partitions (although Windows can’t name their file systems). There’s the 124GB main partition for OpenSuse, then there’s a 20GB and a 2GB primary partition (I think one of them is a swap partition).

Do you have any suggestion on how I should proceed? Or am I doomed to have those 500GB of empty space be forever unusable because of some braindead partition limit?

#2

Post the output from:

# fdisk -l

Please use code tags for that output.

#3

Using DOS or GPT partitioning? IF DOS you can put an extended. With GPT you an have as many primary as you need

If you already have an extended you may have to expand it to use the space

#4

I tried a partitioning software named easeus partition master. While Windows’ own partitioning software was showing the three Linux partitions as primary (and thus refusing to create any new ones), EPM was showing them as logical instead, and was able to create a new logical partition in that empty space. It seems to be working fine. I don’t know why the two softwares are disagreeing on the type of partitions.

So I suppose my question is not relevant anymore.