Hello everyone.

It’s been quite some time since I installed Linux alongside Windows, and recently I mostly just use Linux.

I made a mistake when partitioning my drive, multiple times. I tried dualboot on my previous machines in past and time and time again the same happens: I think “well linux is lightweight” and give it like a 50 GB partition, then realize it’s not enough.

I think I managed to shrink my windows partition and grow my linux root partition once, however I don’t remember how I did that exactly.

Now I’m thinking of a way to backup my windows partition and move it to an external USB drive, to reformat it for linux use, but still be able to boot into windows, maybe via VM? Is it doable?

My current partitions:

nvme0n1     259:0    0 476.9G  0 disk               # the only drive in my laptop
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1    0     1G  0 part /boot         # I think this is an "UEFI" partition, not sure if I can touch it in any way
├─nvme0n1p2 259:2    0    16M  0 part               # This is "Microsoft reserved partition", it was automatically created by windows during installation, not sure if I can touch this
├─nvme0n1p3 259:3    0 129.4G  0 part /mnt/windows10    # my "C:\" partition with windows, ntfs, I want this to run in a VM or be bootable from external drive
├─nvme0n1p5 259:4    0    50G  0 part /             # My archlinux partition, ext4
├─nvme0n1p6 259:5    0  14.4G  0 part               # "WINDRIVER" partition, ntfs, I think it was there when I bought the laptop, not sure if can be touched in any way
└─nvme0n1p7 259:6    0 282.1G  0 part /mnt/games    # btrfs partition for data shared between windows and linux, here's my steam library with games, btrfs because it's well supported by linux and windows (with a third party driver)

What I ideally want:

• Probably UEFI partition
• 130 GB partition for archlinux, probably this should be ext4
• 280 GB partition for non-system data (movies, music etc), probably btrfs
• 50 GB partition for /home, probably btrfs as well
• Windows 10 as a bootable live USB or virtual drive that can be run in a VM stored on external USB stick

What are my options?

Is it possible to backup windows partition in way that it can later be run in a VM or being booted from external drive? Can I just format that partition into ext4, move my / partition files to the new partition and use it as my new root partition? I hope it won’t break file permissions and stuff and “just work”.

What can I do safely to get rid of windows on my drive, but still keep the working system somewhere else in case I need the software (you know, adobe, corel, MS office etc.)?

I’m not good with most of these things (partitions, can they be safely resized or moved around, backed up and restored, what’s UEFI partition etc.).

Before you say “just make a backup and do whatever you want”, I understand that this is what I should ideally be doing, but unfortunately I don’t have multiple huge drives just laying around, I only have 1 external SSD which does not have too much free space, so I’d like to find some optimal way to achieve this without having to buy terabytes of additional storage.