cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/28921393

It may be too much to ask but here it goes:

I have temporarily installed LMDE6 on an HDD where I had a bit of free space, worked with it, experienced Steam with Proton and now I am convinced: I want to move to Linux from Windows for good.

Have another disk, an SSD in which most of the space is taken up by the Windows C: partition. Would like to move Linux there after shrinking the Windows partition a bit more than what it currently occupies now.

I have tried to do this with Paragon on Windows, but after restarting no change can be seen, despite no error being presented. Tried from Linux with GParted but all attempts end up with an error when running ntfsresize.

So

  1. What do I use to do this and how do I do it safely? 2.How do I move the content of my current Linux partition (less than 50 GBs) to that disk keeping the bootloader and everything else working? And what filesystem is best to use?

Thank you in advance for your help!

  • @[email protected]English
    6•12 days ago

    Others have pointed out what may he going wrong (drive locked due to Windows fast startup).

    A slightly different tack - dual booting windows and linux on the same drive is a bad idea. One reason is the messy boot set up which can cause issues with windows not booting or linux not booting, or either/both fighting over the boot partition. It can get to the point of using repair disks to repair one or the other or both. It can be managed but make a mistake and its a real headache to fix (I say that as someone who has been their and done that and learned the lesson)

    If you want to switch to linux but keep windows “just in case” and have a desktop I’d get a new SSD and use it as a dedicated linux drive. SATA or even better an m.2 card if your motherboard has the slots.

    A separate drive is far better as linux can be the drive booted by the BIOS and then Grub can then point back to your untouched windows drive to boot it when you want. If linux updates it won’t affect windows, and if windows updates it won’t affect linux. Also if you have a drive failure you won’t lose 2 OSes and all data in one go.

    Personally I have 5 drives in my PC - easy expansion of storage is a big benefit to a nice full size PC. I have one largely unused windows drive, and 4 ext4 drives.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•11 days ago

      A separate drive is far better as linux can be the drive booted by the BIOS and then Grub can then point back to your untouched windows drive to boot it when you want.

      this is the way to do it.

      i have one system at home set up like this. boot menu’s been borked for years by an update. won’t boot the other drive, never have bothered to fix it–i just bring up the bios boot drive select and boot it that way.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•11 days ago

      I do have 2 M.2 slots available.

      Is there any hardware specification I should be pay attention to when buying for exclusive Linux use?

      If I was to install one more home partition from the LMDE installation USB, would it automatically fix things for me in Grub or would I have to fix things myself before or after?

      • @[email protected]English
        4•11 days ago

        If I was to install one more home partition from the LMDE installation USB, would it automatically fix things for me in Grub or would I have to fix things myself before or after?

        If I understand you right, you want to install two additional SSDs, one for Linux root (system), probably ext4 formatted, and one ‘home’ for your personal data?

        If that’s the case, the boot loader GRUB is going to be installed onto the system SSD and will usually automatically detect the Windows boot loader on your current, Windows only, hard drive. If it didn’t, you need to toggle an option in GRUB’s configuration file and run update-grub again.

        For your home-partiotion on the other SSD, there exist two options:

        1. The home partition is Linux exclusive, probably ext4 formatted (this doesn’t work with NTFS), and all your data will be stored there. Yet, afaIk, you need to install an ext4 driver in Windows to access the data when you’re on Windows.

        2. The home partition is mutually accessible. (This the setup on my wifes laptop). There it’s NTFS formatted and the respective folders (Documents, Downloads, Pictures,… ) are mounted one by one using bind in /etc/fstab to their Linux counterpart.

        Edit: I’ve forgot to mention that, first I created folders named Documents, Downloads,… on the new partition before being able to mount them in Linux.

        After copying the data in Windows from the old folders to the new ones, the old folders can be deleted and replaced by hardlinks to their new counterparts using the Windows command line or PowerShell.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•10 days ago

        Just a possibility: Check if the m2 slot is for disk. There are many boards where there are WiFi exclusive m2 ports. For disks there are also m2 sata and m2 nvme port variations. You need to find out what yours are. Consult your motherboards technical documentation if in doubt. If the BIOS can boot from it, Linux can too.

        Edit: that beeing said I never encountered problems with a similar setup ( I boot from Linux on nvme m2 then there is a combined windows /data disk)