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I want to remove windows 10 and install Ubuntu on my computer, but I neither want to erase the entire hard disk nor erase other partitions because I have a lot of data stored in them. I just want to remove windows partition and install Ubuntu on the space left by it.

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    UEFI or BIOS? And either way only use Something Else install option. Best to also make full image backup of Windows as many users make leap to Ubuntu only, but then find one application or game that only works well in Windows & want Windows back. Have you dual booted for a while? Post this above and add code tags to preserve format: sudo parted -l
    – oldfred
    Feb 26, 2017 at 16:32

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The first step is to download the disk image file of the Ubuntu distribution you want to install in your system. You can download any DE (Desktop Environment) version of Ubuntu, since you can always change it after installation when you desire to do so.

Create a bootable CD/DVD or a USB drive. Use any software like Rufus for this purpose. Download Rufus here https://rufus.akeo.ie/.

Insert the bootable media and select the option in your BIOS to boot from it. When you successfully enter the menu after booting from your bootable media, you can choose to proceed in two ways:

Either select Live boot to try Ubuntu once in your system and proceed to format your Windows partition from there using GParted, or you can straightaway proceed to the graphical install option, where you will format the Windows partition just before all your further installation steps. I will recommend you to go with at least trying Ubuntu for once in the Live mode. Then you may again reboot from your bootable media and install Ubuntu using graphical install method.

You can proceed to delete all data of your Windows 10 partition (just that particular partition in which your Windows is installed) and then format it in EXT4 File System, which is the standard Filesystem for typical installations.

To do so, open GParted in live mode or if you select graphical install, after a couple of steps it will show a menu asking you to do the required partitioning.

Select your Windows partition and then select the delete option. This will delete all your data only in your Windows partition. Then select the freed partition and format it in EXT4 File System. You may want to shrink some 4-8 GB (depends on your HDD capacity and RAM) for your swap partition, but you can add it after installing Ubuntu as well. See I have 16GB RAM. Do I need 32GB swap?

When you format your partition in EXT4 filesystem, you must select it as your primary partition and set the mount point at / (which is the root directory). From there on you can proceed to install in the normal way and just follow the instructions, nothing complicated.

For your convenience later you can opt for auto-mounting your NTFS partitions aside from your deleted Windows partition, by editing your FSTAB. That way you can easily access your data from Ubuntu and feel at home.

Welcome to Linux!

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