Hi

I'm running openSuse 11.0 (64-bit) on a Dell Latitude D830 as part of a dual-boot system. I haven't used Windows for months and I'd like to get rid of it. I've another PC which is Windows only, so I don't need the duplication, but I would like the space back.

Is there an easy way to remove the Windows partition and add the space to my Linux partitions?

My partition info is as follows:

Device Filesystem Total Space Available Space
15G Media ext3 14.0 GB 2.6 GB
10G media ext3 9.8 GB 531.5 MB
Data NTFS 40.1 GB 17.7 GB
48G Media NTFS 45.5 GB 20.7 GB

The Windows partition is the 48G Media one.

I am currently using YaST to do a system back-up to an external hard drive, whilst copying my data to the drive as well. I've spent quite a bit of time customizing my installation and I don't want to start all over again.

Can anyone give an idiot's guide on how to achieve this? I am still fairly new to Linux and not familiar with all of its intricacies.

1. Make a backup copy of any important data on winduhs
2. remove the winduhs partition
3. if you have an entry to boot winduhs, edit your bootloader config and remove it
4. reformat the winduhs partition for something more suitable to Linux (ext2/3, whatever)
5. mount the old winduhs partition wherever you please

option 1: use a partition resizing tool to grow the linux partition over the winduhs partition (only possible if the geometry of your partition allocations happends to be favorable)

option 2: make an archival copy of your linux system on an external hd; 'cp -a' will do - then boot from a live CD, repartition the HD as you please, copy the archive back, and set up the bootloader. Thanks to 'udev', most of the links in the archived '/dev' directory may in fact be unnecessary - with the use of udev it's typical to only have 'console' and 'null' in /dev and the init script mounts a whole new set of device nodes over /dev before running udev - but variations exist between distros of course.

What would a favourable geometry be?

I have deleted the Windows partition and reformatted it to ext3.

My disk info now shows:

DEVICE FILESYSTEM TOTAL SPACE AVAILABLE SPACE
------ ---------- ----------- ---------------
15G Media ext3 14.0 GB 2.8 GB
10G Media ext3 9.8 GB 478.9 MB
Data ntfs 40.1 GB 17.7 GB
48G Media ext3 44.7 GB 42.2 GB

I want to be able to reallocate the space from the 48G Media to the 10G Media. Unfortunately, these are not contiguous partitions. The relevant parts of the partition table are:

DEVICE SIZE TYPE MOUNT START END
------ ---- ---- ----- ----- ---
/dev/sda 111.7 GB ST91208234AS 0 14592
/dev/sda1 45.4 GB Linux native /tmp 0 5931
/dev/sda2 40.0 GB HPFS/NTFS /windows/D 5936 11168
/dev/sda3 26.2 GB Extended 11169 14592
/dev/sda5 2.0 GB Linux swap swap 11169 11430
/dev/sda6 9.9 GB Linux native / 11431 12731
/dev/sda7 14.2 GB Linux native /home 12732 14592

I want to move the empty space at sda1 to the end of sda6. sda6 is almost out of space and I have had a couple of software installations failing because of that.

Is there an easy way of getting sda6 to use the space at sda1? I think that I'm at the limit of my Linux knowledge with this, so any help would need to have step by step instructions which a child could follow.

That's where the bit about backup/archive, reformatting, and restore come in.