[Solved] Uninstall Manjaro after having installed Linux Mint Cinnamon

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koffeemon
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[Solved] Uninstall Manjaro after having installed Linux Mint Cinnamon

Post by koffeemon »

Hello Folks,

Hope there is some help regarding removal of Manjaro Plasma after having installed LInux Cinnamon. Was trying to evaluate the preference between the two distros. I found that I prefer the Cinnamon more and now wishes to remove (uninstall) Manjaro. So that I can use the remaining free space for Cinnamon.

I had earlier spent so much time trying to install Manjaro at first and despite much tweaking and learning from youtube, I am now afraid to just delete the partition in case the Cinnamon will not boot.

Is there some documentation or afficiandos that can guide me how to safely remove Manjaro without affecting the boot of Cinnamon? Prior to that I had plenty of problems with boot failure when I wanted to swap back the Windows 10 hard disk to that notebook. Now the Windows 10 hard drive wont boot, though the content is still there.

The notebook is an Acer Travelmate P645M, an 8-year old notebook that still work wonders. 8GB RAM and 500GB SATA SSD. BIOS is UEFI and security is disabled.

Meanwhile, I am still grappling to understand UEFI, Boot, GPT etc.

Any help is much appreciated. Thank you folks.
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Termy
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Re: Uninstall Manjaro after having installed Linuxmint Cinnamon

Post by Termy »

How did you install Manjaro? To a separate drive or a separate partition(s)? It's unclear what your situation is, so there's nothing anyone can do to help you until you reveal more of the mystery. :P Perhaps share your inxi -Fxxxrz between [code][/code] tags?
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koffeemon
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Re: Uninstall Manjaro after having installed Linuxmint Cinnamon

Post by koffeemon »

Hi Termy,

Thank you for reading this. Manjaro was installed via Ventoy USB at first. On the 500GB SSD. Created the necessary partition as per screenshot attached. I think that would be partition 6.

After that Mint was installed, also via Ventoy, on /dev/sda1.

Wanted to keep sda1, remove the Manjaro, use the free space to merge with Mint. So that I have just one OS. The Mint.

As of now when I boot the PC, I see the Manjaro grub screen with two options to select the OS: Manjaro as first one and Mint as second one.

Would that info be enough?

Many thanks.
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Pierre
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Re: Uninstall Manjaro after having installed Linuxmint Cinnamon

Post by Pierre »

Hi koffeemon ,
welcome to our forum.
:)

what you would need to do, is to set the LinuxMint System as the Boot Menu Owner
- with it's Boot Repair Tool that is found on the LinuxMint Live Media .. your Ventoy usb stick.

then reboot your machine, again, to check that the Boot Menu is now from the LinuxMint System.

from that point, you can then format the partition that Manjero is upon,
in order to use that Free Space as your data drive.

IE: you don't Uninstall any Operating System,
but rather, you would replace it, with something else .. usually another Operating System.
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Please edit your original post title to include [SOLVED] - when your problem is solved!
and DO LOOK at those Unanswered Topics - - you may be able to answer some!.
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Re: Uninstall Manjaro after having installed Linuxmint Cinnamon

Post by pbear »

Transferring control of boot to Mint is very easy, no need for the Boot Repair app. Boot into Mint from Manjaro's grub menu. Once there, open Terminal and run this command: sudo grub-install /dev/sda. That's all it takes. As you are booted to the system you want in charge of boot, grub-install can figure out all the other details on its own.

Be aware, once you do this, you won't be able to boot Manjaro anymore, as Mint's grub is incompatible. Well, there's a way to do it, but it's complicated. So, don't transfer control of boot to Mint until you're absolutely certain you're done with Manjaro.

What will be more tricky is merging Manjaro's space into Mint's. They are, after all, at opposite ends of the partition table. In theory you could delete the Manjaro partition and its swap partition, move the others, then add the unallocated space to Mint. Moving partitions is usually safe, but there is no guaranty. I can't recommend it unless you're confident you know how to restore the Mint system from backup if something goes sideways. It would be safer to reformat the Manjaro partition, then use it as a data partition. Or just keep it in reserve in case you want to try another system some day.

By the way, which system was booted when you took the screenshot above?
Cobrin
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Re: Uninstall Manjaro after having installed Linuxmint Cinnamon

Post by Cobrin »

Lol back up your data, wipe the hdd and install Mint Cinnamon fresh. That is what I'd suggest someone that isn't very experienced with these things.
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koffeemon
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Re: Uninstall Manjaro after having installed Linuxmint Cinnamon

Post by koffeemon »

Pierre wrote: Tue May 17, 2022 11:28 pm Hi koffeemon ,
welcome to our forum.
:)

what you would need to do, is to set the LinuxMint System as the Boot Menu Owner
- with it's Boot Repair Tool that is found on the LinuxMint Live Media .. your Ventoy usb stick.

then reboot your machine, again, to check that the Boot Menu is now from the LinuxMint System.

from that point, you can then format the partition that Manjero is upon,
in order to use that Free Space as your data drive.

IE: you don't Uninstall any Operating System,
but rather, you would replace it, with something else .. usually another Operating System.

Thank you Pierre, for the welcome. Meanwhile I am also following what pbear wrote and this seem to be solving the problem for now. I will write more in pbear's post. Thank you for the assistance, cheers.
koffeemon
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Re: Uninstall Manjaro after having installed Linuxmint Cinnamon

Post by koffeemon »

Cobrin wrote: Wed May 18, 2022 7:09 am Lol back up your data, wipe the hdd and install Mint Cinnamon fresh. That is what I'd suggest someone that isn't very experienced with these things.
I would love to do this shortcut way, but I wont learn much the more difficult issues when I need to resolve one day, when I know I have to stand on my feet. I am wiling to learn some hard lessons. There is spare time to learn too, and then find some gainful work after that. Cheers Cobrin
koffeemon
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Re: Uninstall Manjaro after having installed Linuxmint Cinnamon

Post by koffeemon »

pbear wrote: Wed May 18, 2022 2:32 am Transferring control of boot to Mint is very easy, no need for the Boot Repair app. Boot into Mint from Manjaro's grub menu. Once there, open Terminal and run this command: sudo grub-install /dev/sda. That's all it takes. As you are booted to the system you want in charge of boot, grub-install can figure out all the other details on its own.

Be aware, once you do this, you won't be able to boot Manjaro anymore, as Mint's grub is incompatible. Well, there's a way to do it, but it's complicated. So, don't transfer control of boot to Mint until you're absolutely certain you're done with Manjaro.

What will be more tricky is merging Manjaro's space into Mint's. They are, after all, at opposite ends of the partition table. In theory you could delete the Manjaro partition and its swap partition, move the others, then add the unallocated space to Mint. Moving partitions is usually safe, but there is no guaranty. I can't recommend it unless you're confident you know how to restore the Mint system from backup if something goes sideways. It would be safer to reformat the Manjaro partition, then use it as a data partition. Or just keep it in reserve in case you want to try another system some day.

By the way, which system was booted when you took the screenshot above?

By the way, which system was booted when you took the screenshot above? <<< This was taken in Mint using the disks.

I followed the suggestion and got the Grub 2.04 screen, it listed Mint and Manjaro. Mint still works and Manjaro is dead. After reboot, tried to get into Manjaro, that didn't work as expected as Mint and Manjaro are still listed.

Rebooted again and got into Mint finally. And used disks to delete the dev/sda5 and dev/sda6 partitions. Now I have free space of 241GB. I doubt it is possible to merge with the dev/sda1. But I can use the free space as data drive, or for future OS as you have mentioned.

I am not touching the following:
Swap Partition 2 as this was for Mint.
Filesystem Partition 3 - not sure this belongs to Mint.
NO_LABEL Partition 4 - not sure

As of now, I shall focus only on Mint and be good at it. No point wasting time on Manjaro (or other Arch systems). I have tried many different distros, mostly the deb ones and they are fundamentally the same body in different garments.

TO all the folks, who have tried to help me , I really appreciate them.

Now just one last bit to solve. How to remove the Manjaro boot option (doesn't work anyway) in the Grub menu.

All the best...Pastel
koffeemon
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Solved - Re: Uninstall Manjaro after having installed Linuxmint Cinnamon

Post by koffeemon »

OK, all done now. Boots directly to Mint, as this is the only OS. Nice and simple.

Using the free space 241GB for something else.

Next step: Installing Arduino, VS Code, Atom and learn Python.
pbear
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Re: Uninstall Manjaro after having installed Linuxmint Cinnamon

Post by pbear »

Congratulations. Now to tie up a few loose ends.
koffeemon wrote: Wed May 18, 2022 7:39 am How to remove the Manjaro boot option (doesn't work anyway) in the Grub menu.
Boot Mint, open Terminal and run: sudo update-grub. That should leave you with only Mint on the boot menu.
Filesystem Partition 3 - not sure this belongs to Mint.
NO_LABEL Partition 4 - not sure
Partition 3 is your EFI partition, used as part of the boot process. You definitely need this. Partition 4, on the other hand, appears to be a second EFI partition created by Manjaro, or perhaps you manually. Not needed and can be deleted.

Third loose end. Looks to me like you haven't set up Timeshift. You should do that before doing anything else. It's a system recovery tool. If you mess up something in your experiments, Timeshift is how you get back to a working system.
koffeemon
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Re: Uninstall Manjaro after having installed Linuxmint Cinnamon

Post by koffeemon »

pbear wrote: Wed May 18, 2022 12:13 pm Congratulations. Now to tie up a few loose ends.
koffeemon wrote: Wed May 18, 2022 7:39 am How to remove the Manjaro boot option (doesn't work anyway) in the Grub menu.
Boot Mint, open Terminal and run: sudo update-grub. That should leave you with only Mint on the boot menu.
Filesystem Partition 3 - not sure this belongs to Mint.
NO_LABEL Partition 4 - not sure
Partition 3 is your EFI partition, used as part of the boot process. You definitely need this. Partition 4, on the other hand, appears to be a second EFI partition created by Manjaro, or perhaps you manually. Not needed and can be deleted.

Third loose end. Looks to me like you haven't set up Timeshift. You should do that before doing anything else. It's a system recovery tool. If you mess up something in your experiments, Timeshift is how you get back to a working system.
Hi pbear, will for the first 2 suggestions.

As for Timeshift, yes I have started this on the new partition and called it data. It's effective.

And ENJOYING very much indeed. Super CHeers!
koffeemon
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Re: Solved - Uninstall Manjaro after having installed Linuxmint Cinnamon

Post by koffeemon »

Thanks to anyone who remarked this as solved. All is good.
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