After nine months of not having booted my Windows even once, I think it’s time to wipe the Windows related partitions once and for all and claim the space. The problem is I think the way my partitions are structured, it may not be that easy. I am assuming everything other than the two ext4 partitions will have to go. What do you think? r/linux4noobs -
Someone even suggested I nuked the whole thing and started again, which would be the absolute last resort and only when I ran out of space.
EDIT: In the end, having considered all replies, I decided to go with a compromise. I wiped the NTFS partitions and made an ext4 out of the unallocated space. Then, I moved /home to that new, larger partition and if it all continues working for a day or two, I will wipe the old and smaller /home, which is not mounted now anyway, and use it for storage. This allocation will last me for ages until I have to reinstall the OS, at which point I will use the opportunity to tidy things up. I thought this was not the time to break my system moving partitions. There were some hairy moments (eg when a UUID changed quietly and the system failed to start) but overall it was OK.
Thanks to everyone for the help. This thread was very educational and I hope others will find it useful too. As a sidenote, I posted the same question to a much bigger subreddit and I received very few responses and little help. So, the much smaller Lemmy wins hands down!


The fat32 formated partitions are EFI System Partitions used to boot your PC. I assume that sda3 is the one Windows created, while a later Linux install created sda5 as an alternative. Yet sda5 doesn’t seem to be really used (with that cute 9MB used), so your Linux boot stuff -including a bootloader that would allow you to start Windows (or you picking directly from EFI?)- is probably all sitting alongside Windows’ EFI stuff in sda3.
In fact I wouldn’t touch anything there without some backup.
I have changed the partitions and all seems to work but I still get the bootloader menu with the Windows option even though there is no Windows partition. Not a huge problem, but it is a little annoying I can’t remove references to Windows without risking breaking my setup.