After nine months of not having booted my Windows even once, I think it's time to wipe the Windows related partitions once and for all and claim the space. The problem is I think the way my partitions are structured, it may not be that easy. I am assuming everything other than the two ext4 partitions will have to go. What do you think? r/linux4noobs -
Someone even suggested I nuked the whole thing and started again, which would be the absolute last resort and only when I ran out of space.
EDIT: In the end, having considered all replies, I decided to go with a compromise. I wiped the NTFS partitions and made an ext4 out of the unallocated space. Then, I moved /home to that new, larger partition and if it all continues working for a day or two, I will wipe the old and smaller /home, which is not mounted now anyway, and use it for storage. This allocation will last me for ages until I have to reinstall the OS, at which point I will use the opportunity to tidy things up. I thought this was not the time to break my system moving partitions. There were some hairy moments (eg when a UUID changed quietly and the system failed to start) but overall it was OK.
Thanks to everyone for the help. This thread was very educational and I hope others will find it useful too. As a sidenote, I posted the same question to a much bigger subreddit and I received very few responses and little help. So, the much smaller Lemmy wins hands down!
Unfortunately, your existing /home and the ntfs partitions you could remove are in completely non-contiguous regions, so you cannot easily just combine the space. If I were you, I would switch to LVM piece-meal. Ideally, you'd have some other medium were you can temporarily store the current contents of /home while your repartition the drive. Then combine sda2 and sda7 into a volume group and pull just one logical volume out of it for the new /home.
Otherwise, create a new volume group with only sda2 in it (just overwrite the existing ntfs filesystem) using
vgcreate, create a logical on top of that usinglvcreate, make a filesystem in that usingmkfs.ext4, I would add the-m 0parameter for a non-root filesystem, mount that somewhere under/mnt/, move or copy over all the contents from/hometo that mountpoint, taking care to replicate file owners and permissions (I would just usecp -a), then once this is done (and you've double-checked that it is because at the next step you can lose data if you're not careful),umount /home, extend the volume group to include sda7 usingvgextend, enlarge the logical volume for the new /home to the maximum usinglvresize, enlarge the ext4 filesystem in there to the maximum possible usingresize2fs, finally editing /etx/fstab to use that new logical volume as /home and remounting /home.I think that's a good plan. With a backup, moving step-by-step and some reading it's difficult to get it horribly wrong. If the new
/homedoesn't work while the old/homeis unmounted, I will just have to backtrack. Minimising risk sounds like a project though.