"This time you only got yourself to blame by removing the # indiscriminately in fstab, as nobody advised you to do it . . .

What you should do is to revert to the working system you have before."

Here is the problem, the entire 320gig drive is working without problem, it simply isn't mounted. Every partition: primary, logical, extended.

Your system should have sda1, sda2 and sda3. If you want to enlarge sda1 you need to "bodily" shift sda2 and sda3 to the end of the disk so that sda1 boundary can be resized.

My disk, as currently partitioned has the three partitions you describe. From the screenshot you can see there is an additional huge sda4.

On the unmounting problem I believe it is just your understanding of an extended partition which is just a border for holding a set of logical partitions. Since you have no logical partition inside so there is nothing mountable. Thus Gparted is displaying everything correctly.

I don't fully understand what you mean, the screenshot, named: /dev/sda3.png, shows that the boot directory isn't mounted. I do say that the disk drive seems to be working flawlessly. Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (v 7.10) was reporting shutdown errors (fail) when the # was removed

You can gain a better understanding if you use the terminal program "cfdisk" to do partition. With cfdisk there is "no" facility to create an extended partition. You only create either a primary or a logical partition. When the first logical partition is created the extended partition is automatically generated, using the next available unused primary partition position between sda1 to sda4.

If I had time to become as skilled as you, sir, I would give up my day job and become a Linux programmer. As it stands, I had hoped to take the information from these posts and write a brief tutorial on how to make this painless, but I no longer believe that is possible. The painless part, I mean. I will endeavor to change the partitions as you suggest, moving them "up" one at a time. While we all know that nothing is foolproof, it is hard to reconcile the dearth of information about Linux partitioning. If I had Linux and M$, then the job would have been painless. Nuts. Thanks for your time.