I recently removed windows 10 from my pc, how can i merge the unallocated space with /dev/nvme0n1p5? There’s the boot partition between so i can’t just adjust one of them and merge with the other using the resize/move button. How can i do it?

  • kevincox@lemmy.ml
    2·
    1 year ago

    Most filesystems only support extending themselves with space at the end of their partition. However in this case since the unallocated space is larger than the actual partition you should be able to just copy the existing partition to the start of the disk, then extend the partition and grow the filesystem. I haven’t done this before and always take backups, but you should be able to do something like:

    1. Make a new boot partition.
    2. Copy the raw boot partition data from the old partition to the new one.
    3. Delete the old boot partition.
    4. Create a new root partition.
    5. Copy the root partition data to the new partition.
    6. Delete the old root partition.
    7. Use the empty space to extend the root partition.
    8. Extend the root file system to take up the whole partition (resize2fs).

    Since you are never overwriting data in any step this should be fairly safe. If you are cautious you should be able to boot up the system between every step to make sure that it is still working and you haven’t lost data before overwriting the old partitions.

    Some gotchas are checking how your filesystems are discovered/mounted. You may need to update your boot configuration to reference the new partition ID or make sure that you use the same labels (depending on how you are referencing the root partition).