Dual Boot Question

arizonaheat

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Hello All I have my Hard drive Partitioned 50% Linux lite and 50% Linux mint! I dual boot my system at start up--My question -- is there an easy way to totally delete the linux lite and the partition its on and combine the entire hard drive so Linux mint can use that alone? I simply dont want to dual boot anymore I just want one linux OS on the entire Hard drive! I do understand I can simply reinstall linux mint but I was just wondering of there was a simple way to do what i am asking! Thanks so much!
 


arizonaheat wrote:
is there an easy way to totally delete the linux lite and the partition its on and combine the entire hard drive so Linux mint can use that alone?
There are a few ways of doing this. One way is to delete the installation by using a partitioning tool to clear it, then add a filesystem to it like ext4, and then mount that partition into the other existing linux installation on a suitable mount point.

To avoid booting issues, have grub control the booting from the existing installed distro (Mint), and have it updated after the deletion. The newly created partition can be mounted into the existing installation manually with the mount command, or automatically on boot if it is configured in the /etc/fstab file.

Partitioning tools include Gparted which runs a GUI, parted and fdisk which are command line. There's lots of others. Filesystem creating tools include the mkfs.ext4 command and many others prefixed with mkfs.
 
G'day @arizonaheat and welcome to linux.org :) from DownUnder.

-- is there an easy way

and

just wondering of there was a simple way to do what i am asking!

I can tell you what I would do and you can be the judge.

I'll ask a couple of questions first, and then I will tailor my answer accordingly.

BTW if you are in Arizona - I am in Queensland Australia so I am 17 hours ahead of you, so allow for that.
  1. Is your computer running on BIOS/MBR or UEFI/GPT?
  2. Given you are dualbooting, I am guessing you have made the acquaintance of GParted, is that so?
  3. If yes, can you give us a screenshot of the subject drive, showing us the current layout of the Linux Lite and Linux Mint?
You can use the Attach files button bottom left of your Reply pane to attach, and choose Insert - Full size over thumbnail. There is a maximum of 8 MB allowed for a Post but you won't exceed that.

I'll give you an example from my SSD.

MyGParted-SSD.png

SCREENSHOT - WIZARD'S SSD - GPARTED

Cheers

Chris Turner
wizardfromoz
 
G'day arizonaheat, Welcome to Linux.org

Take a Timeshift snapshot of the LINUX MINT portion...save it to an external drive

Use gparted to format the drive. to ext4.....wiping the partition arrangement.

Use a bootable usb stick of Linux Mint (21.1?....whichever you have)......install it.......then access the Timeshift snapshot on your external hard drive.....and restore it.
 
I did just that not too long ago. MX 19 and MX 21 dual booting them now. Was Win 10, Set up MX 19 alone. Then with MX 21 it was based on Debian instead of Arch like MX 19 so there was no upgrade. I did not want to replace MX 19 that I had already set up with a few VM's for testing so I GParted the drive Timeshift first. Then split the 500gb drive into 2 and installed MX 21. Went just fine.

Was originally going to install Mint Only on another laptop. It was having none of it. Win 8.1 and Mint. It would not upgrade Mint, kept getting a Timeshift error, "Need a recent Timeshift" even though I had that. I finally just installed MX21 alone on that laptop.
 

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