I’m currently dual-booting Windows Vista (eugh!) with Ubuntu 11.04. Now Windows is an OEM install, so there is a Recovery partition as well as the main Windows partition and the bootloader partition. Think you’ll agree that there’s a lot of valuable space being used up there, and I need as much as possible. Windows is corrupted anyway, so I might as well get it off the lappy. So how will I remove it? just erase all the windows related partitions and then use the unallocated partition space and make it a new partition? or is there a way that i can expand the partition Ubuntu is already on, so that it’s only the one partition on the system?
Ubuntu now recognises partitions by UUID rather than partition designations (such as sda2 etc.) for mount points etc., so theoretically you should be able to use gparted to delete the Windows partitions, and resize the Linux one(s).
That said… I’ve known partition UUID’s to mysteriously change themselves.
But GRUB still uses both (hd 0,0) and UUID’s so you’d have to reinstall/update GRUB
So I’d be tempted to delete the lot, and start again from scratch reinstalling Ubuntu and telling it to use the whole disk.
But yes it can be done without deleting Ubuntu… also bear in mind any partiton manipulation carries a small risk of data corruption, so make sure you’ve backed everything up first.
send the output from:
sudo fdisk -l
and I’ll try to explain what to do.
I’ve grown to like this command, lol.
Output:
Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x222eb0b9
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 1698 13631488 27 Unknown
/dev/sda2 * 1698 16245 116854784 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 16245 29939 109994141 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 29939 30402 3715072 12 Compaq diagnostics
Can you send the output from:
sudo grub-probe -t device /boot/grub