On 3/3/23 12:02, Liam Proven wrote:
On Thu, 2 Mar 2023 at 20:12, Frank McCormick <mccfrank@gmail.com> wrote:
What is the best way to go about this? I know partition work can only be done with the disk not mounted Get the free Ventoy tool: https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html
You don't need to install it. Just unzip and run it.
Use it to format a USB key. 8GB is enough, 16 is good, bigger is better.
Then you can just drop ISO files onto the key, no need to write them with any special tool. When you boot any PC off the key (32-bit or 64-bit, BIOS or UEFI, doesn't matter, it works on all) it generates a menu of all the ISOs on the key on the fly every boot.
Boot the distro you want.
You can use something small like System Rescue:
https://www.system-rescue.org/
You can put a full openSUSE live ISO on it:
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Live_USB_stick
You could use a KDE-based distro if you like:
So long as it isn't your main OS, and it doesn't sound like it is, then it's easy.
Boot from the key, use Gparted to remove the partition you don't want any more, and then you can reuse the space.
If you use ext4 you can just resize into the free space with Gparted.
If it's Btrfs, you might need to install the Btrfs tools package for your live distro first.
Or you can use the commands others gave.
This is the simple, easy, safe way. I do it a lot. One of my laptops has about 10 OSes on it, including Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Windows 10 and FreeBSD, managed this way.
Great tool. I have used it once already a few weeks ago when Debian instlalled a new Grub2 which included an osprober package which failed to find my Tumbleweed installation. Thanks Frank