I have a dual boot system (originally Windows-only, but I installed Ubuntu 22.04, now upgraded to 24.04). Here's the current partition table as reported by cdisk:
Disk: /dev/sda
Size: 931.51 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Label: gpt, identifier: 1F801740-93A4-4AA3-B70E-B68673402A87
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sda1 2048 206847 204800 100M EFI System
/dev/sda2 206848 239615 32768 16M Microsoft reserved
Free space 239616 1533048831 1532809216 730.9G
/dev/sda4 1952479232 1953521663 1042432 509M Windows recovery environment
/dev/sda5 1533048832 1952479231 419430400 200G Linux filesystem
Free space 1953521664 1953525134 3471 1.7M
As can be seen my Linux partition is only 200G. But I deleted the Windows primary partition which is about 730G. I'd like to safely nuke the other Windows partitions and make this an exclusive Ubuntu box without losing any data (this is paramount since I have a lot of settings and customizations that I'd like to preserve)
I have two approaches in mind (not clear on how to go about on either though):
- Setup a new disk and follow the steps in This Question. This seems unnecessarily complicated for what I want to accomplish though.
- Some how remove all other partitions and move data from the existing partition to the newly expanded (to occupy the entire disk sans the boot partition). Basically, expand the partition to include all the free space and move the data to start at the beginning sector of the new partition.
Can someone familiar with this type of changes guide me through, please? I found some decades old posts that kind of touch on these subjects, but I'm sure there are more modern and safe utilities to deal with in 2024.
