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Currently I am dual booting Windows 7 and Ubuntu Natty and now I had decided to ditch Windows 7 for good. When I launch Disk Utility, below are my current partition layout:

current partition http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/2816/parions.png

My question is: how should i move the Ubuntu partition ahead and make it primary OS after deleting Windows 7 partition and the rest of Dell junk without lost of data**?

** backup will always be done prior

d4v1dv00
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3 Answers3

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Actually, an alternative solution which may be safer and possibly faster but involves more tweaking:

  1. Boot from Ubuntu Live CD
  2. Use any tool to remove Windows partition and "the rest of Dell junk"\
  3. Create a primary partition with Linux system ID and format it as ext4
  4. Mount both your old and new partitions and physically copy data from new to old. It may take some time but an alternative solution (resizing and moving the partition) involves moving at least the same amount of data

  5. Install GRUB on the new partition, modify /etc/fstab to mount the new partition as root etc. See "Chroot" section here - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2

  6. Boot into your new system

  7. (much later) After you're completely happy with the new install, wipe the old partition and optionally resize the new one so it occupies the whole disk. Or just mount it somewhere.

This way you'll always have a copy of your system in case anything goes wrong.

Sergey
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1

To fix GRUB use boot-repair

kriom
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  1. Boot from Ubuntu Live CD
  2. Use GParted to remove/shrink the windows partition, move the start of the extended partition and to resize the Ubuntu logical partition inside the extended partition. This will take a while.
  3. Moving the beginning of Ubuntu partition will break GRUB. See here on how to fix it.
Sergey
  • 44,353