Switching things up and tidying up my partitiions-I need suggetions

Support & Help Requests
#1

I was just checking to see if I got the upgrade notification on Win 7 since I havent booted into 7 since fall of last year. So I fired it up and found that it’s partition doesnt have enough space for the updates it needs, I had been wanting to nuke and pave this laptop for awhile now either putting ubuntuMate as the base OS and running 7 in a VM or Just giving ubuntuMate the majority of the hard drive. Nearly all of my data I care to keep is already “on the cloud” or external hard drive just a usb drive away this mean my set up options are nearly limitless. So here lies a couple of questions.

  1. If I go with UM as the base OS and 7 in a VM will I run into problems with the licensing of 7 not being on bare metal. I dont care if it is “legal”. Just whether it will work. Because I plan on upgrading it to 10.

  2. With the above option is it possible to just delete the ntfs partitions, resize the swap and UM partitions and then install 7 in the VM? This way I dont loose all my customizations?

  3. In order do this in separate partitions I will need to resize my 7 partition to allow more space to do the upgrade which could end up borking my UM. So I will have to basically start everything over from scratch right?

Give me some suggestions people.

#2

I use Win7 in a VM without any problems. But, I must admit my copy of Win7 is a “special” one and so I can’t say for certain if an ordinary copy might have difficulties. My guess is it will be okay. I suppose you could test run a Win7 VM before attempting to kill your bare metal one.

In terms of deleting your Win7 partition and then resizing your UM partition to take up the slack, this should be do-able. But, I wouldn’t be surprised if you had to repair grub afterwards with Ubuntu-Boot-repair from a live cd/usb.

If it was me, I would do the following:

Test run a Win7 VM inside your UM partition to see if it works okay.

If it does then boot in with a live cd/usb and delete the Win7 partition and re-size the UM partition to take up the slack left behind. If your UM partition has a lot of GBs in use, then this process could take a few hours

Following all of the above, I would attempt a normal cold boot. If UM fails to load, then I would reboot with a live CD and download and run Ubuntu-Boot-Repair. Then cold boot again, at which point, the UM partition should load.

I emphasized the “should” because you never know…!

Bearing in mind the above caveat, you could always download a Clonezilla iso to a usb stuck and take an image of your entire drive, including the Win7 and UM partitions and save it as an image on a usb drive somewhere, before you attempt any of the above procedures. That way, if it all goes horribly wrong, you should be just able to overwrite the lot with your image, which takes you back to where you were. Taking an image with Clonezilla is surprising fast. I can clone a drive with about 40 gig’s of data in about half an hour. Re-casting such an image back to the hard rive usually takes only about 10 minute.

If you need any detailed advice on how to use Clonezilla give a shout out and I will post up detailed instructions on here UB

#3

I’ve never used clonezilla. I know you can copy a partition with gparted though,

#4

If this thing will ever finish with the updates I’m going to register my upgrade then try out the vm situation.

#5

clonezilla is better cos it wraps it up in a kind of zipped format. This means it is smaller than the gparted copy and it also means that if you have saved it on a drive connected to your system, grub doesn’t get confused thinking it is another OS on your system

#6

if you want, I can run through the full procedure for saving a drive in clonezilla using a vm to make a video of it with my commentary in the background, explaining what I am doing. Let me know

#7

That would prolly be a good idea for me. There is a reason my nickname is bonehead.

Thank you. Hopefully more than just I will get use out of it.

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