I’m new to Manjaro and Linux in general and I have a few questions relating to my hard drive after the installation. Originally I planned on dualbooting my system, so I chose the hard drive partition plan during the installation process. I’ve backed up all of the necessary data beforehand on an external hard drive, so I was safe.
Now, I want to uninstall the remaining Windows data and make my machine Linux-only and remove the driver partition. That being said, I wasn’t aware beforehand that Linux used GRUB rather than BIOS for its booting procedures.
How do I remove the hard drive partition, format it and then reinstall Manjaro?
I’ve never used GParted before, since I’m a rookie when it comes to dualbooting and memory partition. Their download page lists the files as .iso. Does that mean I have to activate it by burning it onto a USB or a CD and then using it as if it’s a boot disk?
Moreover, after I clear the leftover windows data, will I be required to reinstall the hard drive through my Mojaro disk again or will I be able to just continue on the data I have now? Again, thanks for the response.
Oh, no, no. It’s available from the Manjaro repository.
pamac install gparted
After that, it’ll be available from the application launcher menu right away. And you don’t need to delete the partition; you only need to reformat it with the ext4 filesystem.
You can simply continue working as you did before. You don’t even need to reboot, unless you’re going to split off /home or another directory onto the newly formatted partition, as per my tutorial above.
If you don’t split off anything however but you still wish to access the newly formatted partition, then be advised that the system will mount it under /run somewhere ─ which is not a permanent mountpoint ─ and that the permissions and ownership on the mountpoint will not allow you to write to it as a regular user, because it’ll be root-owned.
Took a minute to move a few files, then proceeded to format the partition through ext4. I presume I can just use it as a regular hard drive, although for convenience sake (I tend to like to download several mid-to-large sized videogames) how do I shrink it to give space for my main drive?
Why do you need to shrink it? GNU/Linux is far more flexible with regard to space than you were accustomed to in Microsoft Windows.
Why don’t you first tell us how big your “main drive” ─ as you call it ─ is, and how big the new partition is. Then we can advise on the best strategy.
Open up a terminal window and enter the following command…
lsblk
Select the output with the mouse ─ it’ll automatically be copied to the clipboard ─ and paste it here. Then put three backticks ─ i.e. ``` ─ above and below the output. This will neatly format it and make it more readable to us.
It does, but which one is your Manjaro root partition, and which one is the newly formatted one? And have you chosen to split off /home during installation, or is it on the root filesystem?
nvme0n1 259:0 0 238.5G 0 disk
└─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 238.5G 0 part /
This one has the root and most system files. I didn’t pay attention to /home during installation. I just checked the partition option and went with the Manjaro default.
Well, /home is probably the one that’s going to need the most space if you start downloading stuff ─ especially games ─ so you could follow my tutorial and split off /home onto /dev/sda4. The rest of the system doesn’t tend to swell up too much over time ─ not even /usr, which takes up the bulk of the root filesystem.
Even if I say so myself, my tutorial is very good ─ it takes you through the whole thing one step at the time. And if you don’t have a computer handy for reading it while you’re in single-user mode ─ which is a text-based maintenance mode ─ then you can use the browser on your phone, or, if you have a printer, then you can print out a hard copy.
Edit: In case you need some time to think it over, I’ll reset the timer that automatically closes this thread to 10 days.
