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I've found various answers to this question online, ranging from "you definitely can't do this" to "this is doable with gparted," so I was hoping to get a straight answer here. I've ran out of space on my /boot partition on my computer (dual booting Arch Linux and Windows 10), and am trying to resize it with GParted. Attached is a screenshot of the (rather messy) partitions: enter image description here

The /boot partition is /dev/sda2. I had shrank the size of my Windows partition, sda4, with the intent of shifting sda3 to the right and increasing the size of sda2. However, GParted raises an error if I try to do this enter image description here

How do I move the sda3 partition? The end goal of all of this is just to expand my /boot partition, so if someone sees an alternate way of accomplishing it, that would also work.

Henry Shackleton
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2 Answers2

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Microsoft expects an MSR to be present on every GPT disk, and recommends it to be created as the disk is initially partitioned.

Source

Thus, shifting sda3 “to the right” should be fine, to allow for more sda2 space. Just don't “jump” over your first and only windows installation.

(and to some comment: yes, by my experience it does get recreated by Windows upon a (hypotheticla) free intall).

The chain of reasoning (aka „legacy fiddling“) goes like this:

  • anyone not insance wants 'modern' (U)EFI-Boot and GPT partition table
  • Windows requires GPT to support (U)EFI-Boot
  • GPT however does not allow to hide certain information the way it used to happen with BIOS-partioned drives
  • msftdata stands in to store this data

Full details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Reserved_Partition

Frank N
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It has failed because you've tried to not only move the partition, but also shrink it to 15 MiB. GParted considers it unsafe to shrink unknown filesystems, so it has failed. Just move it without changing its size and it should work.

Deleting the partition causes problems in some rare cases, so given that it's just 16 MiB and you're not affected by the MBR partition limit, I'd just move it.

You probably won't need /boot partition larger than 2 GiB.

gronostaj
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