this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2026
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Kinda already covered by others here, but my summary:
You won't have partitions nicely numbered from 1~3 unless you start again.
1 - Backup
2 - Check the backup
3 - Boot from GParted Live (feel free to use another live distro with gparted on)
4- Delete sda1, sda2, sda3 & sda4
5- Move sda5 to the beginning of the drive and resize down to 512MB
6- Slide sda6 & sda7 down next to sda5. I like to have 1MB gap between all partitions to deal with future issues (sometimes restoring a partition might nip the next one)
7- resize /home to fill the rest of the drive
8- redo another backup
If you wanted, you can apply each of those steps and then reboot to check it's all working, then you'll gain confidence in what's happening for the future.
I also advise doing a health scan of your drive to check it's SMART parameters. Something like smartmontools (with gsmartcontrol if you like a GUI). Then you'll know if the drive's going to die during all that data moving...
Step two-and-a-half is to install Ventoy on a usb stick once and then you can simply copy over any iso files you'll every need and get a neat boot menu (plus persistent storage position) from Ventoy. Like a scroll wheel on a mouse, there is no going back after having tried it.
Amen. I took your advice and Ventoy really saved the day. Without it and its option 2 (grub2) no live USB booted.
Yeah, I don't disagree, I just wanted to keep it focused on their partitions.
Personally, I have everything I need on a persistent bootable Arch stick - that basically has everything to fix & rebuild any device I'm working on.