Repartition drive without reinstalling os?

[TTaiiLs]

Hi all

About a month ago i formatted my windows laptop and installed Fedora. I kinda regret doing it now, and want to get a dual-boot setup going. Do you know if it's possible to get this done without having to reformat the entire drive and reinstall both the os-s?

[Electronics Wizardy]

What is the current partition layout?

You should be able to shrink the windows parittion

[TheGlenlivet]

I think you can do this with Gparted or other driver tools in Linux.

[TTaiiLs]

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What is the current partition layout?

You should be able to shrink the windows parittion

ATM is the partition setup. I suppose the best would be to get part3 shrinked about 60% somehow

[TTaiiLs]

1 minute ago, TheGlenlivet said:

I think you can do this with Gparted or other driver tools in Linux.

thanks ill google them

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, TTaiiLs said:

ATM is the partition setup. I suppose the best would be to get part3 shrinked about 60% somehow

Normally if you want to dual boot, you want to install windows first then linux. If you don't do that windows wants to write over the boot loader and that will be a pain.

[TTaiiLs]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Normally if you want to dual boot, you want to install windows first then linux. If you don't do that windows wants to write over the boot loader and that will be a pain.

i see thx

[Wild Penquin]

The bootloader is kinda trivial to restore, however it might not seem like that not for a novice user in Linux. Better research how to do it before installing Windows (though, you can do this "research" from windows afterwards, too).

 

What you probably need is t a Fedora installation / bootable live media. Some distributions might come with a user-friendly application on their installation media to restore bootloader, some might not (I don't know about Fedora). Even in worst case, it can be achieved by following steps: 1) boot from liveUSB media 2) chroot to your current installation 3) run command to restore bootloader. Details vary on the setup and bootloader used.

 

If you are UEFI enabled, it might even be as easy as to choose the right entry from BIOS after installing Windows and then restoring the default (either from the OS, or it might even be possible from BIOS, depending on your MB). It is certainly possible Windows still assumes being the center of the world on UEFI systems and removes all other entries (haven't installed Windows on a dual-booting UEFI system).

[CactusMan]

Alright, it seems like you installed Fedora with its default settings. Meaning, you'll have to do some more work to resize partition 3 since it is an LVM Physical Volume. Here's a guide to shrink that LVM PV for a windows install: https://centoshelp.org/resources/post-install-options/shrink-a-default-install-lvm-pv-to-create-another-partition/

(Make sure you're on a linux live USB/CD when you do this)

 

After following that guide, you have two options:

1. Grab/make a windows install USB with the Windows ISO+WoeUSB (On Linux) or using the Windows Media Creation Tool (Windows), boot into the windows installer and enter the command prompt. You'll need to setup windows to respect your existing EFI bootloader partition (Partition  1).

(I found a guide that did this before, but forgot to save it/forgot right key words for a search.)

 

2. Install windows normally into that free space you created, letting it overwrite your existing EFI partition and then booting up to a <Insert Distro Here> live CD/USB to reinstall the distro's bootloader. Guide on the Arch Wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB