[SOLVED] Made of mess of partitions dual boot

ADDn00b · 04-14-2020, 02:27 PM

It's a long story, please bear with me.

I bought a new computer and installed Fedora 31 workstation (Gnome), dual boot with windows 10. I was happy with how easy it was to do, and everything worked well, except after fiddling with Gnome, I decided I really would rather have the MATE desktop. Followed ALL the instructions to "simply" add the MATE desktop to my existing Fedora 31 (Gnome) installation using the terminal, and it "simply" didn't work. MANY errors with suggestions to add certain verbiage, but I got nothing but MORE errors. The Fedora documentation was incomplete and unhelpful.

So, trying to do this myself, I decided I would install Fedora 31 MATE over top of Fedora 31 workstation (Gnome). I did not use the automatic partitioning because I wanted to overwrite the original Fedora 31 installation and keep the windows installation (now I don't, but that's another story). I ended up creating another boot partition (not on purpose!) and didn't realize it until it was all over and I booted up expecting to see a dual-boot configuration...but there was none. Using gparted just to take a look, I discovered the second boot partition.

My aspiration is to recover the space on my hard drive that windows is taking up, and put Mint 19 in it's place, while having a single boot partition. I don't know *how* exactly I screwed this up, I only know that I've done it before (on a laptop) and ended up installing Mint over the whole damn thing to recover use of my full hard drive. However, I won't do *anything* until I have a full understanding of what went wrong since it *is* working in my preferred desktop environment. And I realize I will likely do this again unless I understand it better.

My system is an AMD Ryzen 7 desktop, if that helps at all.
Thank you for your patience in reading all this, and for any help provided.

colorpurple21859 · 04-14-2020, 06:27 PM

Post the output of the following

Code:

sudo parted -l
cat /sys/firmware/efi
lsblk -f

syg00 · 04-14-2020, 06:39 PM

Or perhaps better, go here and do as it says. Post the RESULTS.txt. This will be a superset of the requested commands, and includes the boot environment.
I have long avoided having separate boot partitions - especially with UEFI; just leave boot as a directory in the root. The EFI can be mounted as expected just fine.

FWIW I added LXCE xfce to a base gnome F31 F30 about a week ago without incident. Haven't tried Mate, but might add that too later if I get bored.

ADDn00b · 04-15-2020, 04:32 PM

Thank you colorpurple21859 and syg00 for responding. I appreciate it.

Results of colorpurple21859 instructions:

Code:

Model: WDC WDS250G1B0C-00S6U0 (nvme)
Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 250GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Warning: failed to translate partition name
Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name                  Flags  
 1      1049kB  404MB   403MB   fat16        EFI System Partition  boot, esp
 3      404MB   85.9GB  85.5GB  ntfs         Basic data partition  msftdata
 2      85.9GB  87.0GB  1074MB  ext4
 5      87.0GB  250GB   163GB                                      lvm
 4      250GB   250GB   419MB   ntfs                               hidden, diag
NAME FSTYPE LABEL UUID                                   FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINT
nvme0n1
│                                                                       
├─nvme0n1p1
│    vfat         E344-C514                               364.1M     5% /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p2
│    ext4         e26de547-3616-4391-b46f-17a4ddbeac68    703.9M    21% /boot
├─nvme0n1p3
│    ntfs   Windows
│                 B86AD8066AD7BEF6                                      
├─nvme0n1p4
│    ntfs   Windows RE tools
│                 18BCD80EBCD7E472                                      
└─nvme0n1p5
     LVM2_m       Dc53ru-MX4Q-j4YX-tlv9-XzUy-SQeY-rt55wY                
  ├─fedora_localhost--live-root
  │  ext4         50eb356a-d56a-4018-bc3b-f8fe42593276     56.7G    12% /
  ├─fedora_localhost--live-swap
  │  swap         17c8e289-a2b1-4fec-bd89-586be516b02c                  [SWAP]
  └─fedora_localhost--live-home
     ext4         4616547e-8cb2-489f-b55c-6dac807b20ca     63.7G     6% /home

I hope I did that right.

syg00, I am not a skilled-enough user to understand the directions provided for the bootinfoscript.

Thank you again for responding.

colorpurple21859 · 04-15-2020, 04:49 PM

Quote:

I don't know *how* exactly I screwed this up,

You didn't screw anything up.

There is nothing wrong with your partition layout that I can see.
nvme0n1p1 is your efi partition which is needed on an uefi system.

nvme0n1p2 is your fedora boot partition where your kernels, initrds and some of the grub2 files required for booting fedora. It is normal for fedora to have a separate boot partition when using lvm

syg00 · 04-15-2020, 06:18 PM

Agreed.
Normally I would expect Fedora to build a dualboot menu for you, but without the listing I requested, it's a bit difficult to say what may have transpired. If you simply want to remove Windows and install Mint, delete nvme0n1p3 and leave the space unallocated, then do the Mint install. It may allocate a couple of partitions there (one for swap) - or may not; I've seen both happen. It is unlikely to create another boot partition, but may; just allow it to do whatever it wants. It will add itself to the efi partition and create a (different) dual-boot menu for your subsequent boots. And yes, the boot menu may revert to Fedora at any time due to updates. Such is life in a multi-boot world.

Oops: something I forgot to mention - don't worry if you see a Windows entry on the boot menu after doing all this, just some remnants that need to be cleaned up later.

ADDn00b · 04-15-2020, 07:38 PM

I haven't seen a windows boot entry at all, and I expected to. Seems my expectations were the problem!

I actually figured out that I use Mint more than I would ever use windows because my accounting program only wants to work on Debian, so I will follow the instructions given by syg00.

Thank you both so much for taking a look at it, and thank you syg00 for providing instructions!