How do you remove LL safely from a UEFI enabled LL/Win8.1 dual boot setup

[m654321]

Many thanks for reply#3 goldfinger re. 'dd' or Clonezilla cloning- very helpful.

Regards
Mike

[gold_finger]

Is there a tutorial somewhere within the forum showing how to use clonezilla?

If there is it would be in the "Tutorials" section.  If not, I'm sure there are plenty of youtube videos on doing it, so have a look there.  I haven't toyed around very much myself with cloning and backup software, but I did test out Clonezilla about a month ago to clone a drive and it worked perfectly.  (I probably should have recorded my steps for a tutorial, but I didn't.)  I forget the exact wording, but basically it will offer two methods of cloning:  one to produce an exact (byte-for-byte) duplicate of a drive or partition, and the other a duplicate of the contents of a drive or partition.  (The descriptions given during operation of Clonezilla will tell you which is which.)

For example, if you want to clone a partition that is 50GB in size consisting of 30GB of files and the rest free space, a byte-for-byte duplicate would copy the entire 50GB.  The other option would only copy the 30GB of files.  For the first, when transferring to another drive, that drive must be the same 50GB size or larger; whereas the second option would only require the destination drive to be 30GB or larger.

Is there a way of using the 'dd' command in linux to clone parts of the drives or is this just for entire drives?

Yes, the "dd" command can be used to copy either full drives or specific partitions.  Here's a link I found a while back that goes through some of the many, many uses of the "dd" command:  How to do everything with DD.  Here's another one:  Learn the DD command.

GUI cloning and backup programs are just easy-to-use front ends for terminal commands.  I'm not 100% sure, but I suspect that Clonezilla uses the "dd" command for disk copy (byte-for-byte) operations and "rsync" for the other.

[m654321]

Many thanks goldfinger.
Is there a tutorial somewhere within the forum showing how to use clonezilla?
Is there a way of using the 'dd' command in linux to clone parts of the drives or is this just for entire drives?

Regards
Mike

[gold_finger]

Easiest way would be to boot from live LL or Ubuntu DVD/CD and use GParted to delete the partitions.  (If deleting a Swap partition, you'll need to right-click and choose "Swapoff" first because the live disk will have mounted it for use during bootup.)  I've not tried deleting Linux partitions from within Wiindows, but if it allows for that then it should work that way too I suppose.

One thing you may want to do now that you've got a working UEFI LL dual-boot is use Clonezilla to make a clone of both the EFI System Partition (ESP) and the LL Root partition as they are right now.  Then if something gets broken in LL you can just restore the Root partition again.  That should restore functionality (minus any added programs and configurations you've done since the cloning).  In absolute emergency you could restore the ESP too, but I'd guess that wouldn't be necessary most of the time.  Best bet:  install any additional programs you want, perform any normal customizations you do (if any), then clone it.  When restoring the clone, all of those things will be done already and the symlinks (from your other thread post) to the DATA partition should be working too.

[m654321]

Don't worry - I am not about to leave LL...  Sometimes though (actually, quite a lot recently!!), I've had to remove LL from the above setup and reinstall it from scratch to set up the dual boot again. Is deleting the LL partition, either through win8.1's Disk Management or through LL's Gparted, enough i.e. does it constitute 'safe removal'...  for example would a registry cleaner need to be run for win8.1 to fix any possible registry problems that might be incurred following LL deletion?

Thanks in advance for your help.
Regards
Mike