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actually I think I need to scoop it back into my windows partition. I do not have any plans to use linux as a major storage system at this point as all of my stuff is in windows format and on several hard drives. I mainly want to just learn linux and gimp at this point.
That might be a challenge, but I think we can do that. It would've been easy to absorb into your /home partition; but to absorb it into Windows partition will involve "squeezing the bubble" from right to left, by using gPartEd in a live session. Partitions can be modified by clicking on the partition and, with the partition highlighted, moving the right or left boundaries to shrink or enlarge the highlighted partition, in the following manner:
- enlarge "swap" to include the unallocated 165GB (no big deal, swap is temporary)
- shrink enlarged "swap" (3.7GB plus 165GB) back down to 3.7GB by moving left edge of partition from left (click & drag) to right until appropriate size is achieved. "unallocated" is now between "/home" and "swap"
- enlarge "/home" to merge "unallocated" into "/home" (again, no big deal, as you're just adding empty storage to an existing partition; no data gets moved)
to merge into Windows, repeat this process with "/home" and the root partition "/", as follows:
- shrink enlarged "/home" back down to size (45GB?) by moving left edge of partition
- enlarge root "/" partition by moving right edge
- shrink root "/" by moving left edge (make sure this partition is at least 10GB for future updates; 15GB-20GB would be better, and plenty!)
- enlarge Windows partition by moving right edge of partition
However, be forewarned there will be a LOT of copy/paste by gPartEd, basically copying entire partitions and pasting entire partitions in different location. Depending on your computer, this could take awhile. And if anything goes wrong, you MAY have to reinstall Kubuntu. But you seem to be pretty tech savvy and if you can repair your GRUB boot record with little more than links to tutorials, you can handle this with gPartEd. Just don't move your EFI/boot partition, or your Windows partition. You can enlarge your Windows partition, on the backside, but do NOT move its front-end starting location. If you just do what we outlined above, and no more, you should be okay!
If you want to take mental reps first, check out this how to:
https://gparted.org/display-doc.php?name=moving-space-between-partitions
Good luck!