Installing Mint, then uninstalling later

[chasepd]

Hello,

I want to dual boot Mint on my computer with Windows 8. For now, both OSes will be on the same drive. However, in the next 6 months to a year, I expect to get another HDD for my PC. At that point, I will want to uninstall Mint from my original drive, give Windows back that space, and install Mint as a dual boot on the second drive.

How difficult will it be for me to uninstall Mint and add the partition back into the windows partition? What would be the process?

[nerdtron]

That, I think will be a complicated process, that is, if you want to retain all your changes in Mint when you move it to another hard drive.

If I were you, when the 2nd drive comes, I'll do a clean install of Mint on that drive. Then, boot into Win8, go the disk management, and delete the Linux Mint partition on the 1st hard drive to expand the Win8 parition.

[DataMan]

You could do a partition level backup of your present Mint partition. When the new drive arrives, you could recover to the new partiton from the backup.

Among the things that come to mind that will need to be addressed in the new partition are:

1. The /etc/fstab will need to be modified to reflect the new /
2. GRUB will have to be refreshed.

My suggestion reflect the above posting, do a fresh install. Less likelihood of things going bad for a while.

-DataMan