Repartition please
Repartition please
Hello, I own two M.2 SSDs and one 3.5" HDD connected to my PC. At the moment, (refer to the attached disk partition table): Disk 0 is the HDD used solely for storage without an operating system. Disk 1 holds a 1 TB M.2 SSD in the secondary slot with an outdated Solus OS 4.5 installation. Disk 2 is a 2 TB M.2 SSD on the PCI lane directly connected to the CPU, featuring several partitions—GRUB, Windows NTFS (Windows 10 and apps), Steam library, and an old Garuda Linux install that hasn't been updated in nearly two years. There are also other Linux partitions, including a 16 GB swap partition matching my 16 GB RAM. Solus OS on Disk 1 is only accessible via the BIOS, so it wasn’t added to GRUB. I recall installing OSes in this order: Windows first, then Garuda with GRUB, followed by Solus OS—which never made it into GRUB.
I’m considering removing Solus and Garuda Linux, reorganizing drives so that the main M.2 drive (Disk 2) is dedicated to Windows, the secondary chipset drive (Disk 1) hosts a Linux distribution (possibly Fedora or Pop OS with Cosmic DE in beta), and keeping a functional bootloader (GRUB?) for easy OS switching. I’m concerned about deleting the existing GRUB and risking system instability since I depend on Windows and want to keep my current setup intact if possible.
Any suggestions for a stable approach to rearrange drives, install a Linux distro, and maintain a usable bootloader? Thanks for your help.
Garuda simply updating grub should include Solus in the grub boot menu using sudo update-grub. The command will execute os-prober, which scans all bootable OSes on connected drives and adds them to the grub loader. REMEMBER: Review the output closely. It might say os-prober is disabled. If so, you must modify the grub config to turn it on. Open /etc/default/grub with nano and add GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false (remove the # if missing). After saving, run update-grub again to re-scan for bootable systems. This time both Windows and Solus should appear in the results. I suggest having Windows and Linux on separate dedicated drives. Disconnect the Windows drive, install your preferred distro on Drive 1. Once Linux is set up, reconnect the Windows drive and boot into it. Use Gparted to remove Linux partitions from the Windows drive (partitions 4, 5, 6 and possibly the last). Then run update-grub once more to include Windows in the boot menu. In BIOS, select your Linux drive as the first boot device.