Hello. About six months ago, I decided to use Linux OS. At that time I was afraid to mess up my PC, so I decided to keep the Windows 11 and split 100G disk space to install a Linux system. I have tried Manjaro KDE and i3wm. But I finally settled down on EndeavourOS. I gradually realized that the Windows 11 on my PC is no longer useful and should be discarded. The problem is I don’t know how. This is my disk status from KDE Partitionmanager:
I want to exchange the position of the two systems, delete the Windows part and then merge the two parts to enlarge the available space of my EOS. I know the KDE Partitionmanager has visual help to manipulate disks. After half a year using Linux OS, I still don’t know how the system boots. That’s why I have the same worry as when I first install Linux system. Will these changes keep me out of the system?
Alternatively, you can just delete the windoze partitions (p2 and p3) and make a new ext4 partition, and mount it with fstab to some directory inside your home directory. That way you don’t need to touch your p4. Of course, what @dalto suggested is a cleaner solution, but could be slightly more risky.
But if you have a good backup, if you mess up, you can always wipe everything clean, repartition, format and install EndeavourOS from scratch.
I think extending the partition on the left would take heck lot of time, since we are moving data essentially from one place to another, where as extending it to right would be super quick since we are just appending extra space to the end.
I tried doing the exact thing in the past and gave up midway because I was having HDD and the transfer was so slow that I thought re-installing an OS would be much faster.
I don’t know exactly what you were doing or how but extending a partition wouldn’t normally move the data itself. It doesn’t matter if it is an SSD or HDD.
Hey Dalto, you could try this in a VM using gparted, when you want to extend partition on left it would do a data move for you, you can also see a progress bar regarding how much data you have moved and how much is left.
From my perspective, yours is the only nonsense reply.
The OP wants to expand a partition. @navap was pointing out that in the OPs case this would require extending it to the left. They were pointing out that it would be slow.
That triggered a discussion between the two of us and they recommended I try it out in a VM to see for myself.
It seems like gparted first moves the data then extends the partition to the right.
More interestingly, parted, which used to be able to extend a partition in either direction removed that functionality quite some time ago. This is probably what is causing the difference in understanding between us. I haven’t tried to do this in a long time.
It seems that at this point, you are correct. There are no tools that let you extend a partition to the left. They move then extend which copies all the data.
Thank you all! I should apologize for not searching resources from the Internet beforehand. There are a lot similar posts, like this and this.
It’s tempting to apply suggestions from @Kresimir and @thefrog . Because it sounds just like mount my SD card. But I think @dalto’s suggestion is better, because I have backed up my entire system
The process went quite smooth. I booted from my USB disk which is my original EOS installation disk. Then I made the following operation using gparted:
unmount p3 and p4
delete p2 and p3. Now there are only p1 - unallocated - p4.
I forgot. Picked the unallocated portion. Then some option in Partition menu. It popped a window that I can slide p4 all the way to the left until it reached p1. Pull the right margin of p4 all the way to the right. Apply the operations.
It popped a window warning you that moving partition may cause system booting fail. Since I did not touch p1, I thought it should be OK.
The whole operation took about 10min. The time it takes is possibly relates to how much data is stored on the disk.
, It was awful slow when I tried it on HDD and I still use HDD (poor man noises 
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