Hey guys, when I installed Linux a year ago, I created a Windows / Linux Mint dual boot system, because I thought I would need Windows from time to time.
Guess what, Linux Mint is so great I only entered Windwos like 2 or 3 times, but in the end I don't need that trash anymore and want to get rid of it.
When I set up the dual boot, I read somehwere to seperate the partitions, so I installed Linux Mint to its own partition as you can see below, maybe this helps for the taks.
I have a 1TB Toshiba HDD /dev/sda. I used it as basic file storage under Windows, now under Linux I just annexed it for the same purpose. It has some weird Windwos partitions I don't know what they are and how do they get there, I only mounted dev/sda4 for storage.
But the evil Windows partition is that 500 GB SSD. As my steam library is expanding a lot, I need space! So how can I get rid of Windows in a safe way? In my boot menu (it's called "GRUB", right guys?) I have a couple of entries, 2 partitions are named Windows but only one of them actually boots into it, the other goes into repair mode and then bootloop. I can look those up if they are important.
So, how can I get rid of the Windows stuff, make the boot menu recognize this, while not harming the Linux disk?
That is how the partition schemes of the 3 disks look like:
1000 GB Crucial NVME
/dev/nvme0n1p1 FAT 649 MB /boot/efi
/dev/nvme0n1p2 Ext4 41 GB /root
/dev/nvme0n1p3 Swap 18 GB
/dev/nvme0n1p4 Ext4 941 GB /home
1000 GB Toshiba HDD
/dev/sda1 NTFS 419 MB Microsoft Windows Recovery Enviornment (System, No Automount)
/dev/sda2 FAT32 315 MB EFI Sytem (No Automount)
/dev/sda3 Unkn. 134 MB Microsoft Reserved (No Automount)
/dev/sda4 NTFS 981 GB Basic Data --> mounted at /media/gigachad/Data
/dev/sda5 NTFS 367 MB Microsoft Windows Recovery Environment (System, No Automount)
/dev/sda6 NTFS 18 GB Microsoft Windows Recovery (System, No Automount) (Push Button Reset)
500 GB Samsung SSD
/dev/sdb1 FAT32 105 MB EFI System (No Automount)
/dev/sdb2 Unkn. 17 MB Microsoft Reserved (No Automount)
/dev/sdb3 NTFS 499 GB Basic Data
/dev/sdb4 NTFS 694 MB Microsoft Windows Recovery Environment (System, No Automount)
Free Space 2.1 MB
/dev/sdband created a new ext4/dev/sda. However yeah I have to go to boot menu, choose the NVME, and then I get to the grub menu where I can choose Linux Mint - annoyingfstab, which went wellNow unfortunately I am still directly booting into the Windows repair mode. Before I directly booted into GRUB where I could choose or do nothing for some seconds to automatically boot into Linux. In BIOS the old Toshiba HDD is actually at boot order 1, but the Linux drive does not appear there.
I will now make a backup of the already mounted data partition on sda (couple 100s of GB, but anyway) and try to remove the old partitions on that disk and merge them with data. It still stays NTFS, but I am too lazy at the moment to completely wipe it. Maybe something goes wrong with boasted anyway lol.
Thanks so far!
In BIOS/UEFI you will likely see multiple bootloader options, one for windows and one for Linux (I think mint's is called "ubuntu" by default). Choose the Linux one.