Hello all. I need some advice on my transition from Windows 11 to Zorin os. I'm currently dual booting Zorin and Windows. Zorin is installed on it's own 500 gb drive partitioned as follows:
/sdf1 100gb /
/sdf2 32gb swap
/sdf3 512mB EFI (boot manager)
/sdf4 368gb /home
I've used a couple other distros in the past but I've found that I love Zorin OS and have made the decision to make the move to Zorin OS as my primary operating system. I will continue to dual boot to win 11 for the very few windows applications and games that I must have. I have an 8tb ntfs drive to hold my videos that are being served up by Jellyfin server on Zorin. So here is my issue.
The 500 gb drive is not enough drive space. I have a 4tb ssd that I would like to move /home to and reclaim the 368gb from my current home to add to /. I do have timeshift system backups. I'd rather not start over since I have installed many apps and done some tweaks to get Zorin OS the way i like it. Would this be reasonably easy to accomplish or should I just jettison the whole setup and start over? Thanks in advance for your help and advice.
I presume that you want to reclaim the 368 GB from your current /home partition by merging it with the 100 GB root (/) partition? If so, then this will not be easy, since those two partitions are not contiguous as per the current drive partition layout.
As an example, if the partition layout had been like this:
Partition
Size
Mount Point
/dev/sdf1
512 MB
EFI
/dev/sdf2
100 GB
/
/dev/sdf3
368 GB
/home
/dev/sdf4
32 GB
SWAP
Then, you could've simply formatted the /home partition and extend the / partition to take the remaining unallocated space (after making all the necessary backup of personal data, of course).
If you are willing to install Zorin OS, I'd recommend doing that. By going with the manual process, you will be able to choose the different layout and even set up your other drive as the /home for the new installation.
Another option, to simplify things, is to mount the 4 TB directly at /home on top of the current partition. This doesn't delete any data on the current drive, but it will make those 368 GB inaccessible for as long as the mount point exists. It's a bit wasteful, but perhaps good enough for the time being?
Thanks zenzen. I was hoping there was a way to just mount the new 4tb drive to home. Nuke the swap partition and the current home partition. Then extend the / partition into most of the free space then create a new swap partition. Guess I'll reinstall.
The order of the partitions matters when doing things like resizing and things like that. In this case, the EFI partition sits in between the root and /home, even after removing the swap partition.
If you're going to partition the drive manually, you can take a look here for some help on how you can go about doing this: