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!

  • diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    8·
    9 hours ago
    • Write down GUID for sda6
    • copy sda5 contents somewhere
    • dd sda6 to sda2
    • delete sda6
    • change the GUID for sda2 to the one written down
    • fsck sda6 to fix size
    • make sda1’s type EFI
    • copy sda5 contents to sda1
    • delete sda5
    • you can now resize whatever is left (if your partition tool doesn’t have resize, just delete and recreate with the same starting sector, again you have to keep GUID for root and fsck it to fix size)