Will *shrink* actually format the drive?

Hello,

I recently got a Dell XPS 9560 and want to dual boot openSUSE with Win 10.

I believe I was installing openSUSE using UEFI. During the partition step, the first line of proposal was in red: “Shrink Windows partition to xxx size.” My question is, will this shrink action delete or format the drive? Or will it just leave the partition there and not touch it?

I at first accepted it and moved on. But right before the installation process I saw a warning saying the installation will delete and format all partitions or something. So I got panic and paused.

I mean, the proposal looks reasonable to me and if it does not format or delete the Windows partition I will just accept it and move to the next step.

Please advise. Thank you.

Hi
It would just shrink and create/format the new partition scheme you created. FWIW better to go into windows and use the disk management tool to shrink the disk… Then when Installing openSUSE use the expert partitioner, rescan the drive and setup how you like.

Since it look like your dual booting, you will need to select the efi partition (sda1) and set the mount point to /boot/efi and no formating so it will co-exist with the windows install.

I would image the final scheme would be something like (maybe sda1 is some Dell recovery tool);


sda1 200MB type ef00 /boot/efi
sda2 16M type 0c01 <MS reserved>
sda3 ?GB type 0700 windows
sda4 ?GB type 8300 /
sda5 ?GB type 8300 /home
sda6 ?GB type 8200 <swap>
sda7? <win recovery>?

Use gparted-live to shrink your partition, it should not reformat and destroy your data
https://gparted.org/livecd.php

After you perform any volume/partition operation on a Windows partition, the next time you boot Windows will detect the changes and do a repair, but that should happen without incident and you shouldn’t lose any data.

Of course, take nothing for granted and make sure you’ve made proper copies or fully backed up and made sure you can restore.

TSU