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I have some problems with disk space management on my machine. This is what my disk looks like now:

Size 1 GB 279 GB 100 MB 166,51 GB 521 MB
OS/Purpose GRUB Partition (?) Fedora EFI Boot Windows Windows Recovery Partition

But I am not able to bite some space from Fedora and normally unite it with the only Windows drive due to EFI partition in-between. I have the live USB with Fedora, from which I can install GRUB again, and I have the whole weekend as the time for my problem

Tetsujin
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Бодя павук
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2 Answers2

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The easiest way to do this is by gparted.

To do the change you have to use a Linux Life media. – Download a Linux Life ISO and install it on an USB pendrive. Most of them have gparted aside, else you can install it from the repository. This also will succeed when in a Linux Life session, but there it will persist only until reboot.

Do not forget to backup your data as at such operations a realistic chance is given that you may loose all of the data.

  1. Boot the Linux Life USB
  2. Open gparted (install it if required)
  3. Shrink the Fedora partition to free some space at end of it.
  4. Move the EFI partition to the freed space.
  5. Resize the Windows partition to fill the whole free space.
  6. Check that there are no errors issued by gparted.
  7. Reboot to Fedora and Windows and check that everything is OK.

enter image description here

dodrg
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  • I have no place to put my backup to. But still thanks. Also there will be the need to reinstall the GRUB after such operations are performed because I need to let the GRUB know what the hell are my OSes moved to – Бодя павук Aug 21 '23 at 13:17
  • No, you do not change the order of the partitions, you do not change the UUID of the partitions and the partition table knows the new positions and sizes of the partitions. So Grub should be fine and also the operation systems will find their configured partitions. – dodrg Aug 21 '23 at 17:51
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The reason this is not simple, is because the computer stores the MFT at the start of the partition. The way a computer reads a hard drive, is it starts at the beginning. This is standard because computers are dumb and can only follow exact instructions. It starts reading at the start of the drive, where it find a partition table. In this partition table it finds the start and end of each partition. It starts reading each partition at the start and finds the data about the files on the partition there. Your Fedora partition is placed before the Windows partition. If you want to merge the Windows partition at the end of the Fedora partition, this is possible if you delete the Windows partition, since you can simply tell the partition table the Fedora partition ends at the position the Windows partition ended, giving it more space. Doing this backwards is a different story. You can't add Fedora to the end of Windows because it's physically written before Windows.

The solution to this is to rewrite the master file table at the start of the Fedora partition and modify the file offsets and stuff like that. The built in software in Windows is not capable of this, but there are some third party programs that can actually do this. I suggest trying Aomei partition assistant. I have tried it, and it reboots the computer into a temporary live boot so it can modify the OS hard drive without having it busy. It's capable of extending partitions backwards while keeping the data on them, but since it rewrites the master file table it's not without risk and it is also a slow process. I don't know if you can do the partition moving with the free version, I got the paid version somewhere online and it works very well. There are likely other tools that do the same thing, you can use Google to find some partition management software.

Foxyz
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