Removing Windows 10 - First partition on Hard Drive

[PDubs]

Hello everyone. I've been using Linux for about two weeks now. I switched two hours after I booted up my new laptop and experiencing god awful Windows 10. Everything is going great, and I'm loving Linux.

I originally had a bit of trepidation about Linux, and decided to partition my hard drive and keep two operating systems. Now, I have no desire to use Windows 10 ever again.

Since my hard drive is only 256 GB, I'd like to delete Windows and roll with Linux as my sole operating system.

Over the holidays my brother told me that this would be a trivial problem -if Linux was installed on the first partition. Unfortunately Windows 10 is hogging the first partition on my hard drive, and he said this makes it a lot more complicated. He's now on the other side of the country, so I'm turning to the Internet for help.

So can anyone direct me to a tutorial showing the easiest way to do this? It would be great if I could get rid of Windows 10 without reinstalling Linux; I'd like to keep all the customization options and programs I've installed.

Thanks.

[WharfRat]

Hello PDubs

Welcome to Linux Mint and the Linux Mint forum

To get a better idea of exactly how you have things setup, can you install grarted and attach a screenshot.

To install gparted, open the terminal application and entersudo apt-get install gparted

Gparted will show in the menu or you can start it from the terminal with gksudo gparted&

Alt-Print Screen will take a screen shot of the window in-focus.

[PDubs]

Alright. Thanks for the tip on the shortcut, that's really useful. Basically I want the second partition to subsume the first.

[pbear]

Now, I have no desire to use Windows 10 ever again.

But you might change your mind. Or want to sell the machine to someone who wants Windows on it. In any event, take a few minutes to offload a system repair disk and whatever form of reinstall media your version supports. No need to back up apps and settings if you don't want to. And presumably you've already backed up your data files. You should retain the ability to reinstall the OS, though, just in case.

[WharfRat]

PDubs,

This would be more difficult as your brother alluded to. Expanding a partition from the end to the right would be no problem.

However, expanding it from the beginning to the left would break the boot loader.

It can be repaired though by following these instructions booted to the installation media.

So the choice of reinstalling with the use entire disk option or taking a leap-of-faith by deleting the windows partition and expanding the / partition is up to you.

If you decide to take the leap-of-faith approach and things go wrong, you can just reinstall at that point.

Whatever you decide make sure you save anything important to an external media and good luck

[PDubs]

Great! Thank you both for your help.

[kreemoweet]

There's really no reason to delete the existing Windows partition, or even to reformat it. It can be mounted while running Linux Mint and the existing Windows files & directories simply deleted.
Linux systems are quite able to use NTFS file systems in almost the same manner as their own native ones.

[michael louwe]

@ PDubs, .......

Great! Thank you both for your help.

.
Bear in mind that the Linux Grub bootloader has been installed in the Windows EFI System Partition(ESP). If you delete the Windows ESP, LM will not boot. If so, you need to recreate the EFI Boot Partition by using GParted from a Live LM session and reinstall the Grub bootloader on the EBP.

For a reinstall of LM, if using the manual "Something else" install method, you need to create an EFI Boot Partition(EBP) at the beginning of the disk/SSD = fat32/550MB/mount point is /boot/efi. Ensure that the "Device for bootloader installation" is the EBP = usually it's /sda1.
... No need to create the EBP if using the automatic "Erase disk and install LM" method, ie it will be auto-created and auto-installed.