Switching to Linux

[Pushpak]

I have a laptop with HDD currently running windows 10 I'm planning on putting a SSD ( in place of optical drive) on this SSD I want to install Ubuntu. For initial few days when I'm setting up my developer environment in linux I want to dual boot after that I want to completely erase all traces of windows from HDD and keep Ubuntu as only OS. But I don't want to loose the data on other partitions. I'm no sure How I can link the dual boot in different drives and especially not sure how to completely erase windows. I don't want to format the old HDD in linux file system ( since then I will have to format it completely) I don't mind formatting SSD. Can someone help me here. Maybe point to some resources ?

[Master Disaster]

Ubuntu will find your Windows drives automatically, all you need to do is double click to mount in read only mode.

[Sauron]

44 minutes ago, Pushpak said:

I'm no sure How I can link the dual boot in different drives

If you tell it to "install ubuntu alongside windows" and point it to the SSD it should automatically find Windows and add it to your bootloader menu.

47 minutes ago, Pushpak said:

especially not sure how to completely erase windows.

If you want to erase windows you can format the partitions it resides on using a tool like gparted. After that you can either keep the leftover space as its own partition or extend other partitions on the same drive to fill the space (though this has a nonzero chance of data loss so you should make a backup first).

47 minutes ago, Pushpak said:

I don't want to format the old HDD in linux file system

You don't need to, you can format it in NTFS if you have the driver (I think Ubuntu comes with it preinstalled anyway) or use another cross compatible file system like exFAT.

[el_murdoque]

I run Ubuntu/Win10 dual boot on several drives. While Windows can't see the linux drives, linux can see and use the NTFS drives. 

To erase Windows from the drive without formatting, just open a console and do

cd /media/<your username>/<Name of your Windows Drive>/ 

sudo rm -rf *

 

This will simply delete everything on the windows drive without altering the partitions. 

 

[LloydLynx]

5 hours ago, el_murdoque said:

I run Ubuntu/Win10 dual boot on several drives. While Windows can't see the linux drives, linux can see and use the NTFS drives. 

To erase Windows from the drive without formatting, just open a console and do

cd /media/<your username>/<Name of your Windows Drive>/ 

sudo rm -rf *

 

This will simply delete everything on the windows drive without altering the partitions. 

 

But the NTFS partition will still be there taking up space. I have tried deleting the Windows partition and expanding the Linux one in past dual boot systems, didn't go well and grub completely broke. I think you should be able to safely expand the Linux partition if you have dedicated boot partitions setup, but I've never tried it.

[el_murdoque]

2 hours ago, LloydLynx said:

But the NTFS partition will still be there taking up space. I have tried deleting the Windows partition and expanding the Linux one in past dual boot systems, didn't go well and grub completely broke. I think you should be able to safely expand the Linux partition if you have dedicated boot partitions setup, but I've never tried it.

I think I misunderstood you. Let's talk about the HDD. What is on there exactly? I assumed it is just your typical windows 10 installation. Do you have the drive partitioned? What are the other partitions doing?

[LloydLynx]

12 minutes ago, el_murdoque said:

I think I misunderstood you. Let's talk about the HDD. What is on there exactly? I assumed it is just your typical windows 10 installation. Do you have the drive partitioned? What are the other partitions doing?

This was a few years ago when I was a noob. To dual boot, I had manually shrunk the Windows 10 partition to half the size of the drive, then made a single ext4 partition in the remaining space to install Linux to( mounted at / ). A week had past and I hadn't booted into Windows since dual booting, so I decide to delete the Windows partition and extend the ext4 partition so it would take up the entire drive. What ever partitioning tool I was using warned me that increasing the size of that partition could break grub, I stupidly ignored it and extended the partition anyways. Grub completely broke and I got what I deserved.

 

I assume if your BIOSboot/EFI partition and /boot are on their own partitions, I think you should be able to safely expand the main partition, but I'm not totally sure.

[el_murdoque]

2 minutes ago, LloydLynx said:

This was a few years ago when I was a noob. To dual boot, I had manually shrunk the Windows 10 partition to half the size of the drive, then made a single ext4 partition in the remaining space to install Linux to( mounted at / ). A week had past and I hadn't booted into Windows since dual booting, so I decide to delete the Windows partition and extend the ext4 partition so it would take up the entire drive. What ever partitioning tool I was using warned me that increasing the size of that partition could break grub, I stupidly ignored it and extended the partition anyways. Grub completely broke and I got what I deserved.

 

I assume if your BIOSboot/EFI partition and /boot are on their own partitions, I think you should be able to safely expand the main partition, but I'm not totally sure.

So, basically you're planning to: 

1. Mount an additional SSD into the computer

2. Install Ubuntu on that one & let Grub do its thing so you have dualboot

3. Work on Linux for a while while you still have access to Windows

4. get rid of windows without damaging the rest of the drive. 

 

The following thoughts occur: Naturally, you will want to boot from the SSD, so that's where Grub lives. 

You should be able to do what you want to the partition table of the HDD once this is not your boot drive anymore. 

 

I recently did something like this, using plain old 'disks', but it was on a SSD, not a HDD. I can't recall my steps exactly, but I ran into a problem and had to keep one partition, but was able to shrink it to a tiny size.