1 Topic by hope06

  • hope06
  • New member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2022-01-10
  • Posts: 2

Topic: [SOLVED] EFI and Windows 10 partition resizing

Hello,

because of a HP battery recall of my laptop I had to install some HP diagnostic programs. Unfortunately they installed on the 100 MB EFI partition of the SSD and there is only 1.2 MB left.
Now I want to resize the EFI to 500 MB and want to ask if my following plan is likely to succeed. See fdisk output below. It's a dualboot installation with Windows 10 first and Linux Mint second..

1. deactivate paging in Windows
2. start the laptop with GParted on an actual Linux Mint USB stick
3. resize /dev/sdb3 at the beginning -400 MiB (Windows system partition)
4. move /dev/sdb2 (Microsoft reserved) to the beginning of /dev/sdb3
5. resize /dev/sdb1 +400 MiB

Eventually I will take the Boot Repair APP of the Mint stick to repair the bootloader (GRUB2) if it's necessary (I don't hope so!).

Sorry for the question but I'm not very familiar with partitioning. 

Thanks

===============================================================================

Disk /dev/sdb: 465,78 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Disk model: Samsung SSD 860
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: AD06CA9F-CC3E-4684-8BAC-7B56F9468EDB

Device         Start       End   Sectors   Size Type
/dev/sdb1       2048    206847    204800   100M EFI System
/dev/sdb2     206848    239615     32768    16M Microsoft reserved
/dev/sdb3     239616 510948150 510708535 243,5G Microsoft basic data
/dev/sdb4  510949376 511999999   1050624   513M Windows recovery environment
/dev/sdb5  512000000 629186559 117186560  55,9G Linux filesystem

===============================================================================

2 Reply by class413

  • class413
  • Moderator
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2007-05-25
  • Posts: 2,376

Re: [SOLVED] EFI and Windows 10 partition resizing

Shrinking the /dev/sdb3 partition from the starting (left) side can take a lot of time, so if you do so you have to ensure that the computer is connected to the power socket, not just working on battery.
From what you write above, I understand that the battery issue is OK now. If the installed software was just for diagnostics or repair and isn't needed anymore, you could think about uninstalling it. The EFI partition has been quite small since the beginning of that partition scheme some 15 years ago, as it was designated for very specific uses. Another approach would be to leave it if the system works well and you don't have to make any other partitioning of bootloader's changes.

Otherwise the way you describe are what is needed. I would suggest to backup your personal important files before, because any partitioning operation is risky in some degree. As for the win10 operating system, you can reinstall it from the recovery partition or even from a web install, because registration/activation keys are already stored in the microsoft servers linked to the laptop hardware serial numbers.

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***

3 Reply by hope06

  • hope06
  • New member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2022-01-10
  • Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED] EFI and Windows 10 partition resizing

Thank you for the infos!

I resized the partitions as planned and nearly everything worked fine except growing the efi partition (dev/sdb1, 100 MB).
After growing it from 100 to 500 MB I had 400 MB unallocated space which I couldn't reach because of the libparted bug (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=649324).
So I copied all files and directories from there to another partition, re-formatted dev/sdb1 to ext4, resized the ext4 partition to the correct size, re-formatted back to fat32 and restored all copied files and directories.
The laptop restarted without GRUB repair needed like before.
Thumbs up!