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!
I would delete the first two partitions and put a new partition there to use as /home. Then expand / where /home was.
It’s easy to expand a partition towards the end of the disk. I would not recommend expanding one towards the start of the disk. That would have to move all of the data. It’s slow and much more likely to cause problems.
I wouldn’t suggest messing with a boot partition unless you are comfortable using a live boot disk to reinstall the bootloader if something goes wrong.
Repartitioning done but I still get the Windows option in the bootloader menu. It’s not the default so not a problem but it’s a little annoying.
It still shows up because the windows boot partition is still there.
If you’re using grub, you can add
GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=trueto/etc/default/gruband runupdate-grub. That will remove other operating systems from the grub boot menu.This did it. Previously
/boot/grub/grub.cfgmentioned Windows on sda3 but now it doesn’t. The partition is still there of course but at least I don’t see the grub menu entry. Many thanks!Yes, that looks safe enough. I am not sure what I would do with a 300GB
/though. Isn’t that wasted space?You could also actually just use it. Just because it is physically located on the root disk doesn’t mean you can’t add some directories and give your user full access to them.
I usually have a
/mnt/scratch, usually on another disk (hence mnt). Or you could make another steam library in/opt/. Steam can have multiple data locations.The purists might yell at you, but it is your system. If you have space to spare in root use it, just remember what is where if you need/want to reinstall at some point.
Edit: or just nuke the NTFS partition, and use that partition as extra storage. Usually you don’t need that much in root, and if you do you can always symlink to another dir to get around it. Just remember to copy anything that might be useful from the ntfs!
User/<foo>has a lot of data, I would copy at least that. Reading ntfs data is not a problem from linux, writing is more hit and miss.If you install a few Flatpak packages, it will fill it up quickly. You could also make a games directory.