reinstalling on SSD, adding /home (and swap???) later, was: Safest way to resize windows partition before installing

[M. Fioretti]

On Tue, Dec 31, 2019 13:11:41 PM +0100, Liam Proven wrote:

> It's perfectly safe to shrink the Windows partition from Linux and
> I've done it many dozens of times. However, correct preparation is
> important to avoid problems, and many people skip this or don't know.
> Additionally the correct prep is harder on Win 10 than before.

Hello Liam, and thanks for these tips and your blog post about this
issue.

As far as I am concerned, however, things took a slightly different
route, so here I am again. Long story short, I did almost all you
suggest, ending up with a still working Windows install in its own 32
GB partition, and the rest formatted as one Linux partition mounted as
/ (I forgot to create a swap partition...).

BUT: seeing that the current hard disk is VERY slow on this Lenovo
Thinkpad T430 with 4GB of RAM, I decided to buy:

* a 128 GB SSD drive for reinstalling Ubuntu, both to make it go
  faster, and to

* a caddy for the current SATA drive, so I can keep using it in place
  of the DVD drive

Now my plan is to:

1) put the SSD drive into the laptop
2) install Ubuntu on it, from the DVD drive, because I got the DVD
   from Linux Magazine
3) remove the DVD drive, replace it with the current SATA drive inside
   the caddy
   
4) reboot, tell Linux to reduce (of 4/8 GB?) the Linux partition on
   the SATA drive and mount it as /home, make a swap partition of
   those 4/8 GB, tell Grub to also add WIndows on the SATA drive to
   the boot options.

if this makes sense (please tell if it doesn't), I would need a
refresh/pointers on the best way to do (4), and your opinions on where
to put the swap, on the SSD or on the SATA drive. I' *AM* reading
these right now:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/652337/why-no-swap-partitions-on-ssd-drives

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/t/673809/ssd-with-or-without-swap-partition/

but newer feedback is always welcome. I won't have time to do any of
this before Sunday and, in general, I've done all that stuff and more
in the past, but not recently, and IIRC not on Ubuntu, that's why I
ask.

Thanks,
	Marco
-- 
M. Fioretti http://mfioretti.com                   http://stop.zona-m.net

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