Win10 to Win10 & Ubuntu (Dual Boot) to Ubuntu

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alisam

830 posts

Ultimate Geek

#319173 30-Mar-2025 07:42

My HP ProBook 470 G1 Laptop runs Windows 10 and not a candidate for moving to Windows 11 (and I don't want to try ways to get Windows 11 onto the laptop).

I have spent a lot of time getting Ubuntu to work with the applications I need, on an old NUC (again cannot run Windows 11).

So, I want to prepare the HP for October 2025 by installing Ubuntu into a new partition and replicate the Ubuntu setup I performed on the NUC.

Once that has been done, I want to erase Windows 10 and keep Ubuntu.

How do I do this? Can I expand the Ubuntu partition to replace 3 Windows 10 partitions i.e.

(C:) - 223.39 GB

(Disk 0 Partition 3) - 851 MB

(System Reserved (E:) - 350 MB.

Note: I have re-installed Windows 10 a few times and windows has automatically created the above partitions.

PC: Dell Inspiron 16 5640 (Windows 11 Home), Dell Inspiron 7591 2n1 (Windows 11 Pro), HP ProBook 470G1 (Windows 10 Pro), Intel NUC7I5BNH (Zorin)
Net: Grandstream 1 x GWN7062 Router, 1 x GWN7665 Access Point
Storage: Synology DS216play NAS, 2 x 6TB
Media: 3 x Amazon FireTV. Echo, Dot, Spot
TV: 2 x Samsung H6400 55" LED TV, Panasonic TH-P50G10Z 50" Plasma TV
Mobile: Samsung Galaxy A52 5G
Wearable: Gear S3 Frontier

nzkc

1572 posts

Uber Geek

#3358669 30-Mar-2025 08:28

The short answer is Yes.

There's a utility called gparted (there's even a bootable ISO for it) that can be used to do this. Its pretty intuitive to use. You'll probably want to update grub to remove the windows boot entry too. Technically wont hurt it being there - just selecting it will do nothing.

fe31nz

1232 posts

Uber Geek

#3358825 30-Mar-2025 22:54

If you boot a recent live Ubuntu installer image, gparted is now available from there. Just select "Try Ubuntu" then Ctrl-Alt-T to open a terminal, then "sudo su" to get a root prompt, then "gparted". On older Ubuntu images where gparted is not installed by default, if your network does DHCP connections, the image will get an Internet connection and you can install gparted into the RAM image from the root prompt by "apt install gparted" or "apt-get install gparted", and then run it.

The easiest way to run bootable installer images and the like these days is to create a Ventoy USB stick:

https://ventoy.net

and then you can copy any supported .iso image onto the Ventoy stick and boot it from there. There is a massive range of supported images, including Windows and Ubuntu:

https://ventoy.net/en/isolist.html

Advanced hint: When running gparted, it can only handle partition types for which the supporting library files are available. If you find gparted showing you a partition of a less frequently used type where the commands to manipulate it are greyed out, that is probably the problem. So you may then need to install those library file packages. For JFS partitions, do "apt install jfsutils". For VFAT/FAT32 partitions (commonly found being used for EFI partitions), do "apt install dosfstools". And so on - there are heaps of obscure filesystems out there. Once you have installed the library packages, you will need to shut down and restart gparted.