Yesterday I installed Fedora 37 Worstation in dual boot with Windows 11. My goal was to test the whole. As everything works very well, I would like de reinstall (i.e. clean install) F37 (and by the way encrypt the disk). However the (re)installation process now requires space and offers me to delete partition(s) for that.
Can you help to choose what i need to delete without breaking everything else (don’t want to break the dual boot and my Windows data).
The installer displays (and i don’t know what i can safely delete) :
1,8 Tio SSD 2 TB - nvme0n1
WinRE_DRV - nvme0n1p1 - ntfs - 1,3 Gio on 2 Gio
/boot/efi (Fedora Linux for x86_64) - nvme0n1p2 - EFI System Partition
Unknown - nvme0n1p3 - Unknown
BitLocker - nvme0n1p4 - BitLocker
/boot (Fedora Linux 37 for x86_64) - nvme0n1p5 - ext4 - 580 Mio on 1024 Mio
The info you posted indicates that you could (should) remove only nvme0n1p5 & nvmeon1p6. Those are /boot (ext4) and the btrfs partition which would contain / & /home.
No doubt I didn’t do things according to the rule of the art (I confess that my previous use of Linux dates back to the 90s). However, by deleting only the brtfs partition during the installation, I was able to reinstall Fedora adding the encryption disk option. So far everything is working properly (and it could preserve my dual boot).
It certainly should have worked as you did. However, I believe you will find that now you may have an unused space in /dev/nvme0n1p5 that is ext4 which the original installation used as /boot.
The command lsblk -f will give details for you.
Yes ! You’re right. The nvvme0n1p5 is now unused and the new /boot is nvme0n1p6. I have now nvme0n1p7 with crypto and btrfs.
In fact I stupidely thought that the installer would reuse previously created partitions including nvme0n1p5.
What are your suggestions if I want to clean all this ? I think i’ll have to delete everything related to the Fedora installation. If I’m right, what is the right way to do this ? A new reinstall deleting nvme0n1p5, nvme0n1p6 and nvme0n1p7 ?
Yes, the cleanest and easiest would probably be to remove those 3 partitions and reinstall if you did not mind doing it another time. That method should leave you with no unused space.
However, you certainly do not have to do a new install and start over after deleting everything.
The size of nvme0n1p5 is probably about 1 GB or so which is relatively tiny when compared to most drives today.
It is unused, so could be left as is, or if you really want to clean it up could be removed.
Tools such as gparted would allow you to delete it, then relocate the existing nvme0n1p6 into the empty space remaining if you were to choose to do so. You also could expand the next partition into the space remaining after relocating nvme0n1p6.
Personally I think it probably better to leave it as is, or maybe remove it and do nothing else, since the next step would be to also expand the encrypted btrfs volume (nvme0n1p7) into the space where the current nvme0n1p6 is now, and that involves a significantly greater risk when working with an encrypted volume.
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