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!

  • noughtnaut@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    Step two-and-a-half is to install Ventoy on a usb stick once and then you can simply copy over any iso files you’ll every need and get a neat boot menu (plus persistent storage position) from Ventoy. Like a scroll wheel on a mouse, there is no going back after having tried it.

    • Stopwatch1986@lemmy.mlOP
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      48 minutes ago

      Amen. I took your advice and Ventoy really saved the day. Without it and its option 2 (grub2) no live USB booted.

    • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.uk
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      5 hours ago

      Yeah, I don’t disagree, I just wanted to keep it focused on their partitions.

      Personally, I have everything I need on a persistent bootable Arch stick - that basically has everything to fix & rebuild any device I’m working on.