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I currently have a dual boot system with Windows 10 and Fedora 25 installed. I am want to make space to install Kali as a second Linux distribution. This is what my internal drive currently looks like:

enter image description here

This is what I'm planning to do in preparation:

  1. Shrink the root and swap partitions for Fedora, I'm honestly not sure why I made them so big to begin with (this will recover around 45GB of free space)
  2. Move swap and home to the left so I can use the extra space
  3. Shrink nvme0n1p9 to 150 GB (that is where my media is currently stored)
  4. Create a separate partition for my media (Photos, Music, Videos) I currently have a 100GB for all of these combined and will add around 20-50 GB extra space for it to grow.
  5. Use the remaining 162GB to install Kali
  6. (Optional) Install BURG from Kali

I'm using a Live Gparted disk for this, and would like to konw

  1. What is the safest way to do this without destroying my Fedora partitions.
  2. What changed do i need to make to etc/fstab so grub can still find everything
  3. Could I use the same boot and swap for Fedora and Kali?
  4. Is there anything I'm missing that could screw me over or make this less complicated?
  5. Should the media partition be ntfs or exFat?

Thanks for your help in advance!

Eyesee
  • 131

1 Answers1

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  1. Plug in external media and cat out images of every partition you wish to backup ie. sudo cat /dev/nvme0n1pX > /path/to/external/storage/partX.img where X is the partition number to backup. Also, try to change the end of the partition, not the beginning.
  2. /etc/fstab is not used by grub2, osprober is used by grub2 (in a separate toolchain - generally called after a kernel is installed/removed) to locate installed OSs. The query results are then built into a configuration file (read by grub2 at boot). So, unless you've manually added grub boot entries, you should be fine.
  3. According to this answered question, you can share swap with some caveats.
  4. If you back everything up and follow best practices for preparing and performing resizes, you should be fine.
  5. Personally, I'd say NTFS for the myriad of reasons listed here.
Schives
  • 699
  • The partioning reference was really useful. I ended up using dd instead of cat for the backups. Moving /home and swap reset my themes and obviously all open programs were closed. Kali used EFI and didn't need to share boot. Ironically installing burg on Kali was the only problem – Eyesee May 28 '17 at 17:33