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.
EDIT: In the end, having considered all replies, I decided to go with a compromise. I wiped the NTFS partitions and made an ext4 out of the unallocated space. Then, I moved /home to that new, larger partition and if it all continues working for a day or two, I will wipe the old and smaller /home, which is not mounted now anyway, and use it for storage. This allocation will last me for ages until I have to reinstall the OS, at which point I will use the opportunity to tidy things up. I thought this was not the time to break my system moving partitions. There were some hairy moments (eg when a UUID changed quietly and the system failed to start) but overall it was OK.
Thanks to everyone for the help. This thread was very educational and I hope others will find it useful too. As a sidenote, I posted the same question to a much bigger subreddit and I received very few responses and little help. So, the much smaller Lemmy wins hands down!
For historical reasons, I’ve had a /space partition for several machines now. It’s used for large media archives, buffering towards other servers (which only grab stuff every now and then), cold storage and the like.
I would simply delete sda1 and sda2, then that whole part will be available as 1. Format as ext4.
If you play games with steam you could then use it as a space to put games. Steam handles it for you. When you add a disk via Steam settings, it will be listed as an option.
Moving partitions is a tedious task and doesn’t always pan out, I personally wouldn’t risk it. Let it be a thing to do if you would ever reinstall completely for whatever reason and start fresh then.
Also, backup backup backup.
that is an odd layout, even for a windows system with linux added later.
what’s the actual order of the partitions on disk?
Personally I’d just boot into a live environment so the SSD isn’t in use, backup important things, then wipe windows partitions and resize /home to use the rest of the space on the disk
How would you resize
/homeupwards with/boot/efistanding in the middle?You can freely move partitions/free space when the partition is unmounted. That’s why the last guy recommended a live disk, so that all your partitions would be unmounted.
Unfortunately, your existing /home and the ntfs partitions you could remove are in completely non-contiguous regions, so you cannot easily just combine the space. If I were you, I would switch to LVM piece-meal. Ideally, you’d have some other medium were you can temporarily store the current contents of /home while your repartition the drive. Then combine sda2 and sda7 into a volume group and pull just one logical volume out of it for the new /home.
Otherwise, create a new volume group with only sda2 in it (just overwrite the existing ntfs filesystem) using
vgcreate, create a logical on top of that usinglvcreate, make a filesystem in that usingmkfs.ext4, I would add the-m 0parameter for a non-root filesystem, mount that somewhere under/mnt/, move or copy over all the contents from/hometo that mountpoint, taking care to replicate file owners and permissions (I would just usecp -a), then once this is done (and you’ve double-checked that it is because at the next step you can lose data if you’re not careful),umount /home, extend the volume group to include sda7 usingvgextend, enlarge the logical volume for the new /home to the maximum usinglvresize, enlarge the ext4 filesystem in there to the maximum possible usingresize2fs, finally editing /etx/fstab to use that new logical volume as /home and remounting /home.I think that’s a good plan. With a backup, moving step-by-step and some reading it’s difficult to get it horribly wrong. If the new
/homedoesn’t work while the old/homeis unmounted, I will just have to backtrack. Minimising risk sounds like a project though.
Boot a live image from USB, copy /home to a separate physical disk preserving ownerships and permissions, and save anything from the windows partitions that you want you keep. Once you’ve verified the copy is good delete all the original partitions on the screenshot.
From here you install from scratch. You’ll appreciate it later when things aren’t a jumbled mess.
If you have any kind of ssd install the OS to that instead, then use that spinning drive for /home. If you have two ssd drives do /home on the second one and use the spinning one for longer term storage like music or videos or the like.
Also don’t put your swap partition on an ssd, use the spinning drive for it so you’re not wearing out the ssd. You can do a swap file instead of a partition if you miss the windows way. 😆
The easy thing is to just format them ext4 and use them as extra data storage.
Edit 2: don’t delete the efi partition!!! Move that just like your system partition. Unless you want to learn how to rebuild it :) unless you’re using Windows boot manager you can remove the Microsoft folder from the efi partition as well
The good news is your system partition is small so you can delete the first two partitions. Make a small boot partition if you want, make a new system partition second ( bigger than your current one), copy the existing system partition into the new one (without deleting the old one), boot into the new system partition, test that it works, then expand the fs to fill the partition. Then you can move your home partition if you want or just make your system partition huge to fill the space up to your existing home partition, then delete the last partitions an grow your home partition to fill the disk
Edit: once you know the new system partition works you delete the old one.
Use a surface cleaner first. You wanna get the majority of the crud broken up and off first, wiping towards the middle then go get the whole thing with a glass cleaner using a microfiber cloth if you don’t have a squeegee.
