So my older sister works on a laptop with “that other operating system” and she started to complain that the first system drive is too full (that-other-operating-system was giving her errors about insufficient disk space). That laptop had a remains of my attempt to lure her into Linux, but it didn’t work out. Which is totally fine. But the disk had partitions like this:
- system partition of “that other operating system” – 38Gb
- linux partition – 25Gb
- swap partition – 6Gb
- data partition – 250Gb
So, I’ve put a gparted live cd image on a usb stick using UNetBootin, booted the laptop into that, erased linux and swap partitions and grew first ‘system’ partition. When I rebooted I was greeted by lovely GRUB RESCUE prompt:
error: no such partition
grub rescue>
I downloaded boot-repair-disk and put it again on the same usb key using UNetBootin. I booted the laptop with it and chose advanced settings only to see, that it has understood that there is a MBR record missing and that it needs to repair it, so that it boots into ‘that other operating system’ (to put it simply). Just clicked “repair”, and it asked me for internet, so that it uploaded some diagnostic data to paste.ubuntu.com (Ubuntu pastebin), and asked me to reboot. Voila, it booted to ‘that other operating system’, needed to chkdsk + some of the software thought its freshly installed. Other than that, the system partition had additional 20Gb. End of story. Thanks to diligent work of free software community. I’m a bit blown off.
