Today I decided that there is little need in keeping an OS that I’ve used perhaps an hour or less total in the last year, so I deleted its partition. My heart belongs to Linux. :unsmith:

To remove it I grabbed the GParted LiveCD; it turns out I didn’t need to, but I was going to expand /home to fit the space. But either way it’s something to have if I need it later.

My plan was to delete Windows’ partition, hda2, and expand /home, which is hda3, to fill its space. I was expecting this to be quite involved: reformatting /windows to ext3, copying the contents of /home over, deleting the latter and expanding it, changing the label on the new partition to /home, deleting hda3, and resizing hda2 in its place. But GParted abstracts all that away. It lets you tell it to expand things backwards and it’ll deal with all that itself. So I told it to delete /windows and expand /home to fill the space. I clicked apply and waited.

Deleting the Windows partition was fast, but since all the data had to be moved backwards, resizing home wasn’t, at all. It stopped about halfway through the test (thankfully not the commit), complaining of an I/O error. I have no idea why, but whatever.¹

Plan B time: creating an ext3 partition in the place of /windows and call it misc. Which I did, and I now have a 20 GiB empty partition belonging to my normal account. I might in fact do the moving-it-to-/home the hard way, now at least I know my system boots.

Oh, I also had to edit /etc/fstab. Painless, if only because I copied the line above it replacing LABEL=/home with LABEL=/misc (after e2labelling it, obviously). And removed the windows line.

Now I’m off to sudo cp -Rv /home/* /home/.??* /misc. I foresee this taking quite a while.

Edit: I’m back and with the exception of a couple of unimportant files everything seems intact. :yaay: Though I forgot to preserve ownership and home directory /home/andy does not exist is a less-than-nice way of saying it. (You forgot the -p you twonk would have been much better.)

Icon by Alain Clement.

Tags: GParted, Linux, Windows

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 at 9.49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.