Windows 11 is installed on nvme1n1p3, above that there is nvme1n1p4 which ist kind of a Windows games partition.
Now I would like to finally ditch Windows and the plan is to just delete both Windows partitions, allocate the free space to nvme1n1p6, shrink it in order to be able to again allocate free space to nvme1n1p7.
Question is, would that destroy my Manjaro install? I know I would also need to remove Windows entry from the EFI partition, but will my system boot? To UUIDs of nvme1n1p6 and …p7 change, rendering my system unbootable?
Thank you very much in advance for your input. Highly appreciated!
Yes, you can delete the two Windows partitions, and even merge them into one. You can repurpose those however you like, as Linux won’t care where on the disk they happen to reside.
However please do not attempt to move or resize your / (root) partition, Doing so will likely cause much regret.
Regarding the ESP: Simply mount it and remove the Windows folders. Don’t touch $esp/EFI/BOOT or $esp/EFI/Manjaro. Once the Windows folders are gone from the ESP, they should no longer be detected by os-prober, but you can always run grub-update for good measure.
Hmmm, I actually want to have the free space allocated to my Linux gaming partition which is the big one next to /.
Resizing / from a usb live stick will also cause trouble?
Typically, you can resize / if you only resize from the right, however, if you touch the left-hand boundary, you’re sure to have trouble.
What I might do in your situation is to use the space (currently occupied by the two Windows partitions) as a new /home partition, and not touch / at all.
I don’t know specifically how btrfs works in this regard, but can’t you extend the storage pool to include that extra space - irrespective of where it is on the disk?
Someone else will likely know better than I, but it seems to work, at least in my thought experiment.
Those are my thoughts as well … moving the partition might(?) change the UUID but as mentioned above, this can be fixed via chroot.
Of course there’s the potential for data loss/corruption during the process; may be safer just to clone the / into the freed space, then change fstab entry via chroot, test, then get rid of the old / when sure all is OK.
One thing I’ll note though is that in this case / is on BTRFS, which could well pose other issues. In my case it’s ext4. I have no experience with BTRFS yet.
Alright. System currently is moving root partition to the empty space. I can mount it via live usb and edit fstab if required. Lets see if I bricked my system
I can’t give you any guarantee that everything will go smoothly.
Partitioning should always be done from USB!!!
However, my experience with gparted tells me that if you act carefully, gpartedwill ensure that the UUID of the important partitions does not change. This worked for me when moving and resizing. But I would do the whole thing in 2 steps.
First delete the partitions that are no longer necessary (execute)
Then move/modify/resize the existing partitions (execute)
I definitely wouldn’t exchange location of partitions
However, if the UUID changes, then you just have a few additional tasks to boot the system again.
Please make sure that the EFI partition does not change!!!
“Remember” the old UUID of the / partition
in grub.cfg (/boot/grub/grub.cfg) replace all the old UUIDS with the new ones (please no typos!)
in fstab (/etc/fstab) replace the old UUIDS with new ones
Basically: Before you do something like that, make a backup
Alright, it seemed to have worked. Uuids remained the same and I was able to properly boot the system, delete Microsoft folder from Efi and updated grub.
Now I just have to shrink the new root partition again, to let’s say 200gb and increase game partition which should take a while (move all date to the left) .
knows what to do with btrfs
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