Both a Windows and a Linux question

[Abominablespongecake]

I had a win 10 laptop that i loved. it started to die. I wanted to try linux but hadnt done all the research to migrate over and was made the mistake of going to windows 11 eww.

Anyway when i installed win 11 i had a 1tb hdd and i partitioned 200GB that i planned to eventually dual boot linux on and have 800 for my win 11 eugh.

 

okay so there are like 3 questions coming now:

 

In the image i have 200gb of unpartitioned space and i am running out on win 11. can i make the unpartitioned space part of my C drive? or do i have to set it up as D as a separate drive?

secondly i want to move forward with linux. Can i remove my m.2 with win 11. put another m.2 in install linux and then slowly migrate everything across as i need it? 

 

BUUUT would i be able to go back to my win 11 by switching back if i needed something or some software wasnt working whilst i migrated?

 

basically i would like to acheive both these things without breaking all the work on my laptop because i would cry. alot.

 

 

[PDifolco]

Basically you need a separate drive for Linux, so you've to format your space as a new drive - I think Linux installers can propose it

But I'm not sure if Linux is playing nice with BitLocker (would never use it, I see it as more of a risk to lose my drive than any "protection" it can offer, as the key is on Microsoft data !!)

[Abominablespongecake]

7 hours ago, PDifolco said:

Basically you need a separate drive for Linux, so you've to format your space as a new drive - I think Linux installers can propose it

But I'm not sure if Linux is playing nice with BitLocker (would never use it, I see it as more of a risk to lose my drive than any "protection" it can offer, as the key is on Microsoft data !!)

can i convert that 200gb to be part of C drive?
 

[C2dan88]

55 minutes ago, Abominablespongecake said:

can i convert that 200gb to be part of C drive?

You need to move the 738MB recovery partition to the end of the drive firstr. Once you have the unallocated space to the right of the C partition you can right click it and extend to use the remaining space.

 

10 hours ago, Abominablespongecake said:

secondly i want to move forward with linux. Can i remove my m.2 with win 11. put another m.2 in install linux and then slowly migrate everything across as i need it? 

 

BUUUT would i be able to go back to my win 11 by switching back if i needed something or some software wasnt working whilst i migrated?

If you are swapping drives, Yes. You can do that. However do research on how linux works with BitLocker first.  Otherwise disable Bitlocker before preceding with linux.

[Psittac]

You can extend the C drive as dan said, if you go with a second drive you will need both hooked to the computer to transfer stuff between them otherwise there is no physical way to do it.  If your laptop doesn't have two slot's for drives there are m.2 thumb drive USB caddy thing's that will allow you to connect a drive via USB.

 

I almost said to make some kind of SMB file share to transfer but that would require two computers to be on the same network, it's how I move stuff around and can work between Linux and Windows.  If you have a second old computer with enough space to share stuff you could use that as a buffer for transferring.

 

Another option is to get another drive that is much larger and image your current computer to it then dual boot with the extra space.  There are so many options but having a way to connect two drives at once is the best way in my opinion.