Replacing Elementary OS with LXLE on dual-boot system (with Windows 7)
 

First post, so this might be a silly question:

I'd like to replace Elementary OS with LXLE on my notebook that's currently dual booting with Windows 7.

Ideally, I'd also like to resize the primary partition that I currently have my Linux OS on as I think 30GB is a bit excessive.

Can I do this from a bootable USB without messing up GRUB, or do I need to take the safe option of repairing my Windows installation, deleting and repartitioning with GParted, then going ahead and installing my new distro?

I managed to screw up a few times while setting up my dual boot, so am cautious not to charge in and end up with bootloader problems.

Thanks!

Maybe you could simply start using a free virtual machine and avoid the issues?

You may be able to boot to some media be in live or installer if system is newish. From there you can install your distro. You will have to be careful when reading questions and selecting. In some cases you may have to format linux areas before you attempt install. In some cases you can use windows to manage disks. In fact windows should be used for that if it affects windows at all.

Always make a good backup of your system before you start.

Did I say READ the installers questions???

Let's see your partitions, post output of

Thanks for taking the time to reply!

Not sure if I follow you, jefro. Point taken about using a VM, probably should have tried that. I'm fine with partitioning and the installation process. This is just a question about installing one distro over another in a dual boot system - whether LXLE will install another copy of GRUB, use the existing one, or causes some kind of conflict and leave me needing to start all over.

EDDY1, for some reason Elementary OS - which I've found to be really buggy - decided to remove the driver for my wireless card and bizarrely isn't allowing me to reinstall, so posting logs of partitions is a bit tricky.

From Windows disk manager, I can tell you I have the following partitions: 100MB NTFS + 59.90GB NTFS (Windows 7); 30GB EXT4 (Elementary OS); ~143 GB Extended partition (2GB linux-swap, the rest unallocated)

I could install in the extended partition but I was hoping for a more elegant solution.

Installing in the Extended partition is where you should install as far as the wireless card look at

Thanks, but I think I'll just do the other workaround; I'd rather have my install on the third primary partition and keep the whole extended partition for storage.

Just thought I might be able to use LXLE installer on a live USB to delete sda3 partition; add new, smaller primary sda3 partition and bigger extended sda4 partition ; install LXLE to sda3 and hope that GRUB still works for both Win 7 and Linux. But if I can't be sure, I'll take the safe approach.

Odd thing about the wireless card was I found it, installed the driver & it worked for a while, then it abruptly stopped and said I didn't have the driver installed. Doing the same install procedure again didn't work.

You already have a swap partition on the Extended you can choose to reuse it.

Usually replace <some driver with your driver.