I have recently installed Fedora (F38, KDE) on my Windows computer in a dualboot setup (Fedora manages boot and grub) on UEFI.
I am currently in the process of shrinking the Windows partition to give Fedora more space. (I have made 50GB’s free from Windows to test the process, in the future i intend to move more space from Windows to Fedora.
The problem is that EXT4 (Boot, mounted) is in the way of the Fedora (also mounted) partition.
How can i safely:
unmount and move the mounted Boot and Fedora partitions
enlarge the Fedora partition
don’t screw up Grub for dualboot
Please understand that i know next to nothing about linux, i am learning as i go along.
Picture taken from Gparted in Fedora, as you can see everything is on one physical drive:
Run GParted from live usb (it’s important). You could run any Fedora Live USB then install GParted there or use GParted Live USB.
Open GParted and select “ext4 /boot” partition, right click and select “Resize/Move”. Drag the partition all the way to left. Make sure the item “Free space preceding (MiB)” value are 0. To confirm, click “Resize/Move” button.
Select “btrfs /,/home,/v…” partition and do the same thing but for now you resize it.
Apply the changes by clicking check button or “Edit” > “Apply All Operations”.
It should be save. I did the same thing in the past. Not just once, but twice doing it and the second one I reduced the linux partition to make Data partition.
From above image, you can see that I also move the WinRE tools to close with Windows partition. Because without doing that, my laptop feature (MSI) to reset Windows installation will not work.
Once data in btrfs is there in the additional partition then moving and resizing becomes risky at best and possibly fatal if the /boot partition may need to be relocated. In some ways manipulating btrfs file systems is not nearly as easy as it was to manage LVM and ext4 partitions.
Your suggestion is easy, but it is always best, when possible, to keep data partitions intact. In this case relocating the /boot partition then expanding the btrfs partition does that and does it quite easily without splitting the data across 2 partitions. Shrinking, Expanding, and Moving partitions and file systems that are in one contiguous block is easy. The same is not necessarily true when split across several dis-contiguous blocks.
I wonder why, if you already have this plan, you do not just do it all at the same time? It would avoid repeating the same process in the future.
sorry for the late reply, Thank you for your answer
And you didn’t need to repair the GRUB? I read in other discussions (on other forums) that it is generally not a good idea to move these important partitions around as the GRUB is very sensitive to changes/modifications.
I was in the process of cleaning up my Windows installation, I freed up 50GB’s to test the transferal to the fedora installation, when i better understood the process and completely cleaned up my windows partition i intended to move more space.
But now i have cleaned everything and freed up 100 more GB’s for fedora (and i can transfer all the 150GB’s at once to fedora)
Just to be clear, do i need to do a GRUB repair after I moved and resized the partitions?
