Hey guys my boot partition is 260MB only 70MB is free its a hp intel laptop with windows and arch and i want to increase size without bricking arch or windows or my system if its risky tell me i dont have usb to save it. I am ok to shrink partition sizes.
If you were on fedora I would suggest using gparted for that task when booting from the live install media. I cannot suggest how it would safely performed on Arch.
Note that this is a fedora support forum though your question is a general linux question so is not far off topic when asking about partition sizes.
If I were to do the task you are asking about I would shrink the main partition leaving free space adequate for the new size desired for /boot. Then I would create a new ext4 partition in the free space.
After copying everything from the existing /boot to the new partition the entry in /etc/fstab would need updated to mount the new /boot.
On fedora the file /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg would need altered to point to the new UUID for the new /boot partition. I don’t want to add the steps to do that since I am not aware of the differences in how arch works vs fedora with grub.
HMMMM
The size you indicate makes it seem as if you are referring to the efi partition and not /boot – in which case the statements above are far off track. My laptop which was installed initially with win10 has an efi partition of 256M and only 52M of that is used with both fedora and win11 booting from that partition.
Possibly the command ls -lR /boot could tell us enough to provide better info.
Once again, I would remind you that you are using Arch and this is a fedora support forum. Possibly you should go to the arch support area for better support.
i am planning to switch to fedora its /boot/efi partition sorry its a hp
lsblk -f
NAME FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
nvme0n1
├─nvme0n1p1 vfat FAT32 SYSTEM 1648-0FD5 122.9M 52% /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p2
├─nvme0n1p3 ntfs Windows 9ACA9C1BCA9BF22D
├─nvme0n1p4 ntfs 8A84D3B584D3A24D
├─nvme0n1p5 ext4 1.0 eb9a4cbe-3a41-4830-b619-f2c0ec7eac02 97.4G 25% /
└─nvme0n1p6 ntfs 43DAB0F36AF717F6
With that information and the intent to switch to fedora I would not be concerned about the size of the efi partition. Even though the default is now 600M it seems most systems are able to function very well even when the efi partition is as small as 150M and your 250M partition seems quite adequate for fedora.
My thoughts for your system are very simple.
- boot to the live fedora installer.
- delete the nvme01p5 partition (and leave it unallocated)
- perform an automatic install telling it to share the drive. It will automatically use the existing efi partition (and does not format it even if the summary says it will do so)
I think in almost 100% of all cases that should work quite well. It would appear that you may have around 300+G available in the p5 partition which is more than adequate for almost all fedora systems.
You may be wise to also delete the /boot/efi/EFI/??? directory and its content that are related to the arch installation before performing the installation to avoid issues with fedora trying to provide a boot menu entry for arch.
It would be a good idea to get one and create a backup copy. You may never need it, but if you do need it, it becomes a big problem if you don’t have a back-up.