Is it Possible to Use ‘Something Else’ to Resize Partitions?

[gold_finger]

Resizing partitions from installer's partitioner will not be any less time consuming than doing it in GParted.  Having said that, only time GParted takes a long time to re-size is if it needs to move a lot of files while doing that.  Let's say you now have a root partition for LL that is 50GB and you want to shrink it down to 20GB.  The files in that partition will be concentrated near beginning of partition (on the left side of partition as shown in GParted).  When you shrink partition from right (end of partition) toward left (beginning) you won't end up moving many (if any) files, so operation is fairly quick (seconds to minutes).  On the other hand, if you shrink from left to right you'll actually be moving all of the files to a new location and that will take more time.  Root partitions (when used in conjunction with a separate home partition) typically only have anywhere from 6-15GB of files in them, so that move may not take too long (5-15 minutes would be my guess).


Same principles will apply to existing home partition.  If you shrink from right to left, operation will not take very long.  Left to right could be very time consuming if you have a lot of data files to move.  This will be the case for the installer's partitioning program as well.


Think your best bet would be to open GParted and provide us with a screenshot of what it shows.  Can then advise on best way to proceed after seeing that.

So would it be possible to resize my root and home partitions using the ‘Something Else’ manual installer in the live Linux Lite usb, but leave them both unformatted in order to preserve them, and then proceed to click ‘install’ as required to complete the process (assigning grub to /dev/sda as normal).

I've never tried that myself, but "yes" you could do that.  I have no idea though if everything would be correctly preserved the way you want in the root partition.  (Home partition would be fine, but I'm not sure about root.)  I suspect that some system files that may have changed over time in current system may get overwritten to a "new install" state which could cause either conflicts or unexpected behavior at some point.  That's just my guess though -- I don't know for sure because I've never tried to install over system without re-formatting root.