Resizing / Merging the EXT4 Partition

This is coming due to a personal pain point and the unavailability of a noob friendly guide online.

Context

I have a Laptop with Linux Mint and Windows 10 OS. At the time of installing Linux Mint I underestimated my usage and kept the ext4 partition size just a little more than as recommended on Linux Mint website which is just bare-bones. After some updates and installing few applications I was quickly running out of space.

Problem Statement

After freeing up some harddisk space i was able to create some a new blank partition but after trying various different tools - Aomi, EaseUs, default windows tool, Disks (Mint default), Minitool, PartitionMaster and Disk Genius (The tutorial makes it seem like it is so easy with DiskGenius tool), everything failed giving one reason or the other.  I also tried using Ubuntu on USB to try use ther default tool but that did not work either even after booting through USB which means my hard drive was unmounted. 

Problem Persists: Ext4 Partition was still the same size.

Solution

Before getting to that EaseUs literally tricked me into buying their product. I downloaded the demo version and it demoed that it can easily resize my EXT4 but to actually resize it i need to buy the full product, these are such shady practices esp coz that didnt work. 

Here is what worked for me step by step:

1. I downloaded Gparted Live USB from here: https://gparted.org/liveusb.php
2. Then I created a bootable USB (Instruction can be found on the link posted above). One can use Linux or Windows to create the GParted bootable USB.
3. I booted my windows and then clicked the power icon and then pressed 'Shift' key before clicking the shutdown button (Not sure if this is necessary but i had to be sure). Also keep the 'Shift' Key pressed when clicking on shutdown.
4. Now plug in the USB, go to the BIOS Menu of your PC / Laptop and boot from the USB. On my Laptop pressing 'F2' after pressing power on takes me to bios Menu but on some laptops it can be 'F11' key so check for your Model.
5. Once booted, I was able to exted the EXT4 partition using the GUI of GParted. Please note that I had already created the Unallocated free space using windows default disk manager. If you have not done so you can do that before this step using GParted easily.

That's it enjoy your Linux with new added space. Until next time, Cheers.