Best way to delete small partitions?

Ultimatenab@beehaw.org to Linux@lemmy.ml – 11 points –

Hello all

So I have been using Garuda for a few months now and love it, but when I was doing some maintenance on the system, I noticed that I still have 2 partitions on my NVME for when I had Windows 11. Small partitions (less than 1GB), but I want them gone.

I thought I had cleaned wiped the SSD when I installed Garuda and thought that was the case when I check the disk manager within Garuda and didn't see them. I only saw them as I was creating a merge of two disks and have them showing in the partition list.

My question is, I'm happy to re-install the OS, but I'm not well versed on how to do it before installing the OS in Linux or even within my current OS. I'm still getting my grips with Linux, and any help or even pointers will be greatly appreciated.

8

Be careful, the small partitions might be UEFI partitions (/boot and /boot/efi) and are required for booting your computer.

For the actual deed, flash the latest version of gparted live on a thumb drive and you can delete and resize your partitions.

But don't go deleting things unless you're 100% sure.

Thank you this is the kind of thing that I was after.

To make it even more foolproof install Ventoy on the flash drive and then just copy the Gparted Live ISO on the drive. Ventoy will detect the ISO and let you boot it.

You can add other useful ISO like this and have them around. You can also make folders where you put other files you need and use the drive as a regular drive, Ventoy won't mind.

But yeah, never modify partitions from the same system that runs on them, always boot into a separate flash drive.

Oh so that's what Ventoy does! I keep hearing this name but never got curious enough to dig. That's really neat.

gparted can be installed and run as app on the system, it will give you a good sense of what the partitions are and how they are labeled and flagged. The disk tool (like GnomeDisks) should be reporting the same. if you get differing results it can sometimes be partition was flagged amd removed but the underying data is there and getting picked up by whichever tool is scanning the disk.