Apparently, the easy way is to install Grub Customizer, but I don’t like PPAs so I disabled the OS Prober instead. The partition is still there but at least I don’t see the grub entry.

This did it. Previously /boot/grub/grub.cfg mentioned Windows on sda3 but now it doesn’t. The partition is still there of course but at least I don’t see the grub menu entry. Many thanks!

Well yes, but many users say it’s better to start with a clean install. This gives me sleepless nights as we are slowly approaching the release to Debian 14 .

I wouldn’t suggest messing with a boot partition unless you are comfortable using a live boot disk to reinstall the bootloader if something goes wrong.

Repartitioning done but I still get the Windows option in the bootloader menu. It’s not the default so not a problem but it’s a little annoying.

I have changed the partitions and all seems to work but I still get the bootloader menu with the Windows option even though there is no Windows partition. Not a huge problem, but it is a little annoying I can’t remove references to Windows without risking breaking my setup.

In the end, I went for something like this. I moved /home to the larger partition I created out of the Windows partitions and I will use the old, smaller /home as separate storage.

The problem now is how I can remove Windows from the bootloader. There is no Windows partition left anyway.

Amen. I took your advice and Ventoy really saved the day. Without it and its option 2 (grub2) no live USB booted.

How would you resize /home upwards with /boot/efi standing in the middle?

Very reassuring. The Ship of Theseus approach has been working for me for decades.

It will take some reading but this sounds like a good long-term solution. Perhaps LVM should be the default. And there should be a live USB GUI method that would make the process less scary and safer. Thanks.

ah, OK it’s not just me then. I find the prospect of having to reinstall Debian on my main work machine every two years is scary. I’d rather have the messy partitioning for the rest of my life :)

I think that’s a good plan. With a backup, moving step-by-step and some reading it’s difficult to get it horribly wrong. If the new /home doesn’t work while the old /home is unmounted, I will just have to backtrack. Minimising risk sounds like a project though.

I have been wondering about this. People recommend backing up /home and then reinstalling very casually, eg many recommend a new install when the new Debian stable is released every two years. My personal files and most of my user setup are stored in /home but wouldn’t many customisations be stored in /? I have been tweaking things for nearly a year to get everything working. I wouldn’t want to spend ages to reinstall applications (flatpaks and all) and re-create my working setup. People being so relaxed about nuking their setup tells me I may be missing something here.

Yes, that looks safe enough. I am not sure what I would do with a 300GB / though. Isn’t that wasted space?

This looks fairly straightforward. I have done (1) already. It’s not great that / will be that big, wasting around 200GB but the setup is definitely better than now and the risk is minimal.

I’d rather have a single large /home partition, and the LVM method sounds less risky if I find out how to do it safely. I am sure I read somewhere that LVM is the clean way to manage partitions.

I see my fstab says the following, so it’s UUIDs although I am not sure about that /swapfile:

# / was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=9178d5fa-87a7-4e65-ba88-726f41c84186   /                        ext4   errors=remount-ro   0 1 
# /boot/efi was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=0B9E-D68E                              /boot/efi                vfat   umask=0077          0 1 
# /home was on /dev/sda8 during installation
UUID=0a3aa38a-1673-4064-b573-9a090be7f3cb   /home                    ext4   defaults            0 2 
# swap was on /dev/sda7 during installation
# UUID=ca915564-2474-4399-ae6c-b4d9b73e69d1 none            swap    sw              0       0
#
# added swapfile
/swapfile                                   none                     swap   sw                  0 0 
/dev/sdb1                                   /media/myuser/backintime   ext4   nofail              0 0 

I am happy to leave the fat32 partitions alone, and deleting the first two NTFS partitions and merging them is easy. What troubles me is how to move the new big partition next to /home so that I can merge them. I hadn’t considered using creating an LVM to merge them logically. It sounds less risky for a newbie if I find how to do it.

Thanks for doingthe digging. An archivist may know something more. Or the archive.is people.

I have been using Zotero every day for more than two decades and somehow it hasn’t cross my mind. You may be on to something.

Zotero supports public and private shared bibliographies that you can subscribe to through the client or their web interface. Each entry contains the bibliographical details, notes attachments, file attachments and links to local files. It also captures webpages and metadata through the browser addon. The local database can be backed up and, if self-hosted, you have control. The best part is that academic researchers will be familiar with the software and process. One downside is that the cached file is not independently archived so it could be tampered with. Thanks for the idea.

A wiki is a good idea. Putting a Singlefile or similar all-in-one file in a repository and provide index numbers organised as a look-up table would also work for easy retrieval by a random research user. Both require some admin and more effort from the researchers.

I wish there was a hostable version of archive.is for near-zero maintenance. You just submit a URL over the internet and the web page is cached once along with a screenshot. Then, anyone can access the archived version. This can be done already with archive.is but we have no control over its future, which is critical for long-term dependable archiving.