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
Merging the space after your Data partition is easy. Merging the space before it is slightly less trivial, but doable. GParted is your friend. It has the ability to grow an NTFS to the right, as well as slide it to the left. The slide is copying everything over though, so it will take time.
(Note that if you are mounting Data in your fstab using the string
/dev/sda4and you delete the partitions before it, you will likely need to update your fstab.)Personally, I don't think you need to go as far as unhooking your Linux disk and live booting, but I understand being unsure about it. If any data on these drives is your only copy, that's your first mistake. Back up your data elsewhere (rule of 3, ideally). Then just use gparted carefully.
Afterwards, you'll need to regenerate grub to get the extra boot options to go away. Should be straight forward on mint.
It's gonna feels so good deleting all those nonsense windows partitions.
Edit: I glossed right over your links to your updates saying you had already done all of this lol. GG glad it went smooth for you! Also, I am surprised canceling the NTFS slide mid-copy didn't break anything lol. You might want to back that up and format the whole drive just to be safe. Never know when you'll find the files that were corrupted by that....maybe run an fsck on it.
Me too. After hitting cancel, a new "Force cancel" button appeared, but I luckily waited it out. Gparted reversed all actions it did and also copied back the couple of MB it already shifted over, when it finally told me it succeeded. So I guess the data is fine, but yeah I backed it up before anyway. Thanks for your write up, even if it came a but too late ;)
Cool, I didn't know it was smart enough to undo the copy, that's good to know/hear.