Removing dual boot with 11.04 upgrade

Question

I am using a dual boot set up with ubuntu 10.10 and windows xp. I would like to bin windows completely and use only ubuntu.

• Can I remove the windows xp partition while upgrading from 10.10 or

• Do I have to upgrade using a cd and lose all my files. (I have got them backed up)

Answer 1

If you dont want any files in xp you can just format the Windows XP partition and run sudo update-grub and upgrade Ubuntu using update manager

Answer 2

Update Manager will offer you the chance to upgrade from 10.10 to 11.04. This will upgrade your existing ubuntu installation and will not affect your existing windows installation.

You can remove your windows xp installation by booting from any Live CD and running the Disk Administrator utility or GParted. You can see the NTFS windows XP partition and choose to delete the NTFS partition. When you have done that, you can then resize the existing ext4 partition holding your Ubuntu installation to utilise the extra disk space.

Answer 3

It sounds like you have some data files on your current Windows' partition. Why not copy them to a separate data partition (e.g. drive d:) and leave this partition in place when you install Ubuntu? That way, the data files will always be available, even if you replace Ubuntu 10.10 with 11.04, or a different future version of Ubuntu. I would suggest that it makes sense to separate the operating system and data file partitions specifically for this purpose. It also makes it much easier to back up the data.