grabbing more hard drive space from Windows install

[Tom_ZeCat]

My I originally set up my Lenovo laptop as a dual boot with its original Windows 7 Home Premium and Kubuntu. Later on I added another install of Windows 7 under VirtualBox for the convenience of being able to run Windows and Linux programs simultaneously. For example, I'll work on some finances in Quicken under Windows while simultaneously doing calculations in LibreOffice Calc under Kubuntu. It works fine. I rarely even boot into Windows alone anymore. Doing that does have the advantage of more resources for Windows, but I don't need that very often.

I'm therefore planning to boot straight into Windows only and uninstall almost all the Windows applications. There are a few DVD copying and editing programs that I'll leave behind, ones that do work better when not running under VirtualBox. But most everything has to go, the reason being, the freed-up hard drive space is being ceded over to Kubuntu's partition.

I'm doing this to free up more room to run Mac OS X Snow Leopard under VirtualBox. Why would I do such a thing? The Mac version of Dramatica is way nicer than the Windows one. At about $150, Dramatica ain't dirt cheap, so I want the best version.

So, my questions:
1. I can just use Gparted, right? With Gparted, shrink the Windows NTFS partition, leaving that space unused. Then expand the Linux Ext4 partition into that space. Simple as that, right?
2. If I want, I can just wipe out that Windows install by deleting the partition and then expanding the Ext4 partition into it, right? However, if I eliminate the Windows install like that, do I then need to edit Grub so that it no longer offers a choice between Kubuntu and Windows at bootup? Or will Grub just figure it out?

[vinnywright]

So, my questions:
1. I can just use Gparted, right? With Gparted, shrink the Windows NTFS partition, leaving that space unused. Then expand the Linux Ext4 partition into that space. Simple as that, right?

yes .......but I would use the win7 tools for the shrinking of the NTFS partition ,,,,,,,,click start then start typing "partition" in the run box until you see "partition manager" or something like that (dont remember the exact name of it but it will be apparent) ,,,,,,, gparted or even the Kubuntu "KDE partition manager" will do it if it's unmounted , but its best to use windows tools on windows stuff when possible.

2. If I want, I can just wipe out that Windows install by deleting the partition and then expanding the Ext4 partition into it, right? However, if I eliminate the Windows install like that, do I then need to edit Grub so that it no longer offers a choice between Kubuntu and Windows at bootup? Or will Grub just figure it out?

yes but I would have liveUSB/DVD around in case you half to recover from partition info changing and the current grub not being able to find it's boot files ,,,,,,this may not happen as UUID's are being used , but I'm not shure if thay change in this situation so I am adding the precaution just in case .

when you get back into Kubuntu after this just run

sudo update-grub

and windows will get removed from the boot choices.

VINNY

[SteveRiley]

2. If I want, I can just wipe out that Windows install by deleting the partition and then expanding the Ext4 partition into it, right? However, if I eliminate the Windows install like that, do I then need to edit Grub so that it no longer offers a choice between Kubuntu and Windows at bootup? Or will Grub just figure it out?

Yes, you can completely remove the partition containing Windows. You can expand the remaining partition into the free space, and then you can extend the file system to fill the partition.

I'm not sure about GRUB; my memory isn't so great now that I haven't used it for a couple years. It could be as simple as running sudo update-grub after doing the remove/expand/extend thing. GRUB will likely detect that Windows is no longer present and rewrite its menu files.

[Teunis]

Yes indeed running grub update will remove the Windows stanza, it'll only list bootable partitions that are available.

About using Windows own partition tool, it works well but my experience is it will refuse to make the partition smaller than a certain size.
Running Gparted will allow you to make a much smaller Windows partition.

Starting it up first time after the resize Windows will complain, just follow it's prompts to 'repair' the partition.

[SteveRiley]

That's because neither the graphical Disk Management tool nor the DISKPART command will move the system page file or the hibernation file. So you can't use Windows to shrink a partition smaller than the physical location where either of these files exists. The non-Windows tools don't treat the files as "unmovable" and will happily relocate them as they shrink the partition. Once that's done, of course, Windows has to throw a little tantrum. At least it can recover from that now, simply by deleting its references and creating new ones.