Deleting hard disk partition from Linux

Question

I have a refurbished computer that originally has 1 TB of hard disk dirve and it originally came with windows installed. After some time, the Windows updated and the computer stopped working. Someone helped me and managed to make a partition in the hard disk drive and installed Ubuntu in the computer as OS. I now enjoy much better working with Ubuntu and would like to get rid of the partition that contains Windows and recover the whole 1 TB hard disk drive for the ubuntu system. Is this possible to do? Can anyone explain me how to do this or refer me to online websites where I can learn how to do this? Thanks so much!

EDIT: Following suggestions in the comments, I am using gparted and am getting the following window:

From reading online posts, I believe the partition with the Ubuntu system is the one with the slash / in the Mount Point column. Now, what I don't really know is which one is the windows partition or which partitions I can safely delete and reassign the space. Any suggestions? Thanks!

Answer 1

Windows OS residing in /dev/sda5 in the figure you've shown. In your system it's the only ntfs partition large enough to hold windows installation.

You can easily mount and see which partition containing what and decide to remove them. Like in Windows installation partition you'll find folders relevant to windows. To mount ntfs file system in Linux you need ntfs-3g driver, which usually comes inbuilt with Ubuntu. Otherwise install it using apt install ntfs-3g.

In your system /dev/sda1 is mounted as /boot/efi. So, it's containing grub boot loader. So, don't delete it even by mistake. You can delete /dev/sda2-/dev/sda5 and sda6, sda7.

If your main purpose is freeing up disk space I'll suggest you to delete /dev/sda5 only. Other partitions mentioned above has windows recovery, Windows bootloader etc. They may be helpful in case of a factory restore etc.

Now merging the entire 1 Tb disk is a tricky job. For that you've to first delete all drives except sda1, sda8 and sda9. Then merge all the space and copy all contents of sda8 i.e. Linux root partition into the newly created partition using rsync. Then you've to change /etc/fstab entry properly and boot the system with new file system as root. Also change the root parameter in grub to the new partition.

Once the system is booted with new file-system as / you can delete the existing root file-system i.e. /dev/sda8 and merge it with the new created root file system.

NOTE Changing root drive is a hazardous job. If not performed correctly your current installation may stop working. Another easy solution is delete all partitions and reinstall Ubuntu freshly. Always have a backup of all necessary files before deleting anything.