Rwmoving Winblows

[Beerislife]

Right, I need to boot a Live Linux distro and remove the 'Unknown Reserved' partition and the two NTFS partitions, then move and expand my EXT4 partition to fill the empty space and update the bootloader! All fun and games!

What do you think? Will I run into any problems. I plan to use Linux Mint to do the dirty work since I already have it on USB stick!

I was stuck in windows 10 for over TWO HOURS while it updated itself! I only booted into Windows because I wanted to check the integrity of an external 1Tb NTFS formatted drive! Over two hours to update? WTF is that?

Yesterday I had a massive update to KDE Plasma (5.22) and it was done in less than TWO minutes. I also had quite a few more minor updates today and they were done soon after entering my password!

[oshunluvr]

Moving partitions is always risky, but a live boot Gparted thumb drive should make it possible.

If you wanted to make it easy, your could just delete p2 and p3 and make a new partition and move your /home to it. That leaves a rather large root partition, but it would less risky than moving and expanding a partition.

Also, I'm not the EFI expert but I believe you'll want to delete the windows EFI files or it may still appear in your boot menu.

[Beerislife]

I was thinking of a small /home for config files and stuff. It's too late this evening, but I'll take a look tomorrow. Still cebrelating my first jab!

[Bings]

Don't celebrate with beer, it lowers the efficacy

I've moved partitions like that with good result but backup before obviously.

[Don B. Cilly]

I was thinking of a small /home for config files and stuff.

Why a small one I wonder. Documents, Download, Pictures. etc. are all under /home.
That's the one that usually fills up. If you have a separate /home, / can be quite small.

[claydoh]

Removing all my video files, documents, a steam library, photos, Trash, and everything along those lines, I still have 12Gb of stuff. I probably have missed excluding some things from my list, but between multiple browsers, zoom, slack, etc and ad infinitum, there can be a lot of stuff in caches and various other places.

Having important files on a different physical drive can be a good thing to do, for safety and as a small part of a 'backup' plan, but if they are on a separate partition on the same drive, a failure on that drive means you probably won't be able to access those files.

[Beerislife]

Why a small one I wonder. Documents, Download, Pictures. etc. are all under /home.
That's the one that usually fills up. If you have a separate /home, / can be quite small.

/home is currently on the 1Tb HDD (There are 2 disk entries in my screenshot) I will mount the HDD as /data or something similar and change the location in KDE settings.

It looks like it won't be today either. I just started a massive backup of my current /home to a USB 3 2Tb portable drive...

[Beerislife]

I forgot that there's a small reserved partition on the HDD that will also have to go!

[Beerislife]

I don't think I'll be doing my PC today. It's taking all day just to make Windross Recovery Media in case I decide to sell this Ryzen 5 and buy a Ryzen 9 with 32Gb RAM and an 8Gb nVidia GPU! I could have installed and updated Linux 20 times already!

...

And just before finishing the Recovery Media, Windross threw up an error and quit the operation! I've wasted enough time on this already!

[jglen490]

You could make your newfound free space into a subdirectory of /home, if it will be used for storing created, found, and downloaded files that have value to you. I've done that in times past. Makes it easy to include in a /home backup.

[Beerislife]

Yes, there are lots of possibilities!

I'd like to have my X-Plane install on an SSD but that takes up 114Gb alone! 368,000 files!

[GreyGeek]

Indeed!
And, if you are using BTRFS, you could create @backup under the <ROOT_FS> (where @ and @home reside) and then add a line in /etc/fstab to mount it as /home/backup. Or, if you have a 2nd internal or external drive you could create an sdb1 partition and make it a subvolume titled backup, and mount it in '/etc/fstab. If your use sdb1 and your sda1 goes belly up your sdb1 @backup is still safe.

[Beerislife]

Well, everything is already EXT4 and since I'm an old stick in the mud I don't want to spend time changing things and having to learn something new. Life is short and there's beer to drink!

If things go belly-up I have my data backed up and always have one USB stick with Linux Mint Cinnamon in my box of bits and pieces.

[GreyGeek]

Yup. My stick has been in the mud for 80 years. Wish I could remember half of them.

[Beerislife]

It took nearly an hour to delete the Windows partition and expand the Linux partition into the free space without any data loss (GParted Linux Mint Live) but everything is working fine!

I even managed to make Winblows recovery media before nuking it!

It is/was a lovely day too, but I don't want to go out on weekends, too many people about!