After nine months of not having booted my Windows even once, I think it’s time to wipe the Windows related partitions once and for all and claim the space. The problem is I think the way my partitions are structured, it may not be that easy. I am assuming everything other than the two ext4 partitions will have to go. What do you think? r/linux4noobs -
Someone even suggested I nuked the whole thing and started again, which would be the absolute last resort and only when I ran out of space.
Kinda already covered by others here, but my summary:
You won’t have partitions nicely numbered from 1~3 unless you start again.
1 - Backup
2 - Check the backup
3 - Boot from GParted Live (feel free to use another live distro with gparted on)
4- Delete sda1, sda2, sda3 & sda4
5- Move sda5 to the beginning of the drive and resize down to 512MB
6- Slide sda6 & sda7 down next to sda5. I like to have 1MB gap between all partitions to deal with future issues (sometimes restoring a partition might nip the next one)
7- resize /home to fill the rest of the drive
8- redo another backup
If you wanted, you can apply each of those steps and then reboot to check it’s all working, then you’ll gain confidence in what’s happening for the future.
I also advise doing a health scan of your drive to check it’s SMART parameters. Something like smartmontools (with gsmartcontrol if you like a GUI). Then you’ll know if the drive’s going to die during all that data moving…
Step two-and-a-half is to install Ventoy on a usb stick once and then you can simply copy over any iso files you’ll every need and get a neat boot menu (plus persistent storage position) from Ventoy. Like a scroll wheel on a mouse, there is no going back after having tried it.
Yeah, I don’t disagree, I just wanted to keep it focused on their partitions.
Personally, I have everything I need on a persistent bootable Arch stick - that basically has everything to fix & rebuild any device I’m working on.