After nine months of not having booted my Windows even once, I think it's time to wipe the Windows related partitions once and for all and claim the space. The problem is I think the way my partitions are structured, it may not be that easy. I am assuming everything other than the two ext4 partitions will have to go. What do you think? r/linux4noobs -
Someone even suggested I nuked the whole thing and started again, which would be the absolute last resort and only when I ran out of space.
EDIT: In the end, having considered all replies, I decided to go with a compromise. I wiped the NTFS partitions and made an ext4 out of the unallocated space. Then, I moved /home to that new, larger partition and if it all continues working for a day or two, I will wipe the old and smaller /home, which is not mounted now anyway, and use it for storage. This allocation will last me for ages until I have to reinstall the OS, at which point I will use the opportunity to tidy things up. I thought this was not the time to break my system moving partitions. There were some hairy moments (eg when a UUID changed quietly and the system failed to start) but overall it was OK.
Thanks to everyone for the help. This thread was very educational and I hope others will find it useful too. As a sidenote, I posted the same question to a much bigger subreddit and I received very few responses and little help. So, the much smaller Lemmy wins hands down!
The easy thing is to just format them ext4 and use them as extra data storage.
Edit 2: don't delete the efi partition!!! Move that just like your system partition. Unless you want to learn how to rebuild it :) unless you're using Windows boot manager you can remove the Microsoft folder from the efi partition as well
The good news is your system partition is small so you can delete the first two partitions. Make a small boot partition if you want, make a new system partition second ( bigger than your current one), copy the existing system partition into the new one (without deleting the old one), boot into the new system partition, test that it works, then expand the fs to fill the partition. Then you can move your home partition if you want or just make your system partition huge to fill the space up to your existing home partition, then delete the last partitions an grow your home partition to fill the disk
Edit: once you know the new system partition works you delete the old one.
Just to add, for this you need to use some kind of live boot / rescue media from USB. You can't do that on a live system. Also after moving your rootfs change your fstab to reflect the new setup.