Expanding BTRFS Filesystem to the Left

General system Kernel, boot, graphics & hardware
1

I’ve been dualbooting EOS for almost two weeks and LOVE it! I’m ready to ditch Kubuntu and am unsure of the best approach. I have EOS on a BTRFS partition and Kubuntu on an EXT4 position to the left. Based on what I’ve read I think I have two options:

  1. Delete the EXT4 partition, boot a live USB, extend my BTRFS partition to the left, then run btrfs filesystem resize max / to resize the file system
  2. Delete the EXT4 partition and create an empty partition there, then do btrfs device add to add the empty partition to my home subvolume or something else. Then balance it.

So my questions are: Is one process better than the other? Does it matter when I either resize or add whether I pick / or /home?

Thanks everyone! Hoping to cut the Kubuntu cord soon!

2

You probably can’t extend a partition to the left. You need to move it to the left and extend it to the right.

Option #1 is the best long-term outcome but will be time consuming and, more importantly, incur a bunch of risk.

Option #2 is quick and easy.

If it was me, I would probably do option #2 simply to defer the risk involved. If you aren’t worried about data loss, option #1 is a bit cleaner.

3

I opted for option 1 and it worked like a charm! Weirdly I still have the “ubuntu” EFI entry. I removed it with efibootmgr and it looked like it was gone. It came back on reboot. It doesn’t really matter at this point I guess, GRUB doesn’t see it at least. Thanks for your suggestions!

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Did you share the same ESP in your doubleboot system? In that case, there might be still the Ubuntu boot files/folders on that partition. If your ESP is mounted at /efi /default for EOS), look in there.

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In /boot/EFI/efi I have: BOOT, endeavouros, tools, ubuntu. I had seen that earlier and was thinking about just deleting the ubuntu folder, but wasn’t sure what would happen. That’s why I went with efibootmgr first.

6

You could remove the ubuntu folder. Looks like some UEFI implementation would add an EFI boot entry if the binary is present in ESP.

I had a similar thing happening the other day. I connected a SSD to my system. It had (has still) an older openSuse installation. I may have restarted the machine when it was still connected. Afterwards I was surprised to see that an EFI boot entry for openSuse had been added automatically.

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That worked, thanks!

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