I’ve been using a dual-boot (Win7/openSUSE 12.3 (with latest updates)) for quite a time now. I’m hoping someone can give a numbered list of procedures to follow to complete this task. I want to remove/delete sda1, sda2, sda3, and resize/move the remaining partitions. It would be great to have any heads-ups if there are any.
Here is the result of fdisk -l
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 2048 20572159 10285056 27 Hidden NTFS WinRE
/dev/sda2 20572160 20776959 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3 20776960 362373119 170798080 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda4 * 362373120 976773119 307200000 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 362375168 370567167 4096000 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 370569216 412516351 20973568 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 412518400 976752639 282117120 83 Linux
Backup first
Do the work with a live cd of Parted magic In my experience it’s usually much cleaner and better to start over.
But if you insist. I wouldn’t delete them, I’d format them all to delete all the content, then shrink them all down as small as you can. This way you don’t change your partition table. Or nuke grub.
That should get you a load of free space to expand the extended space, then to resize the logical partitions inside it.
>
> Backup first
> Do the work with a live cd of Parted magic
> In my experience it’s usually much cleaner and better to start over.
> But if you insist. I wouldn’t delete them, I’d format them all to delete
> all the content, then shrink them all down as small as you can. This way
> you don’t change your partition table. Or nuke grub.
> That should get you a load of free space to expand the extended space,
> then to resize the logical partitions inside it.
>
Doesn’t that require an explicit “move” first? I may have been half asleep,
but ISTR going thru that hassle last week with a laptop here. From a fuzzy
memory, I had to first format then shrink the Windows partitions in slot 1
and 2, move the shurnken ones to close up the gaps and open a contiguous
space, then move the extended partition (mine was partition 3 as I had only
2 primaries) and extend it to fill the now-open space at the end. Once I
had the extended partition expanded, I could expand the last one (his sda7,
probably /home) but I also want to expand the root partion as well so I has
to first resize /home, move it to the end, and only then could I resize the
/ partition. All in all, a time consuming operation - even disk-to-disk
copies of partitions that size take time!
I have to go through a similar exercise on the wife’s laptop in the next few
weeks and I’m thinking that using rsync to backup the / and /home
partitions, moving/resizing the empty partitions, then restoring will by
considerably faster. I figure I’ll have to run a rescue to re-install grub
but I save several full-partition copy operations. Took me most of the day
on the first effort.
Depending on size of partitions, and the amount of data it can take a very long time.
But, if you use a tool like gparted live, all the steps can be set up to run in a single operation so it becomes something you set it to run and then only check on its progress every half hour or hour or so.
BTW - If you weren’t aware, if you have a lot of unused space in your partitions and it’s not a brand new system, you can speed up things plenty by
Emptying the trash
Only just before you run gparted live, run a utility to zero all your empty space. On Linux, you use dd. On Windows IIRC there should be a Windows Systernals (used to be called Winternals many years ago) freeware too.
I would just nuke the 1st 3 partitions, and leave it be, unless you really need the space. It is always nice to have free space to try out a new distro. I had to go through several hours of partition resizing to install oS12.3. So I freed 100GB, and made a 20GB partition for oS12.3, the other 80GB are reserved in case I want to try other distros. :\
> But, if you use a tool like gparted live, all the steps can be set up to
> run in a single operation so it becomes something you set it to run and
> then only check on its progress every half hour or hour or so.
>
Good info - thank you. I was using the old one-step-at-time method and
missed this little goodie. Something about old dogs and new tricks…