Remove Windows 8 from dual-boot system

[lucacerone]

Dear all,
I have decided to completely remove Windows 8 from my dualboot laptop. I also would like to remove the partition for the recovery since the occupy quite a lot of space.

Ideally I would like to end up with a system as if I installed Ubuntu (12.04 64 bit, don't know if it is important) using the
"use the whole disk" option during the installation.

Of course in principle I could do this, but I would prefer to avoid since I have a lot of files that need to work with and installed quite a lot of software and customized a lot of applications.

In order to make the system dual bootable I used the "Boot Repair" tool that resulted in the partition table listed below:
(as shown by)

sudo parted -l


Model: ATA ST1000LM024 HN-M (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 1000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: gpt

Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 1049kB 525MB 524MB ntfs Basic data partition hidden, diag
2 525MB 840MB 315MB fat32 EFI system partition boot
3 840MB 974MB 134MB Microsoft reserved partition msftres
4 974MB 487GB 486GB ntfs Basic data partition
7 487GB 487GB 1049kB bios_grub
8 487GB 966GB 480GB ext4
9 966GB 975GB 8476MB linux-swap(v1)
5 975GB 999GB 24.2GB ntfs Basic data partition hidden, diag
6 999GB 1000GB 1074MB fat32 Basic data partition hidden, diag


How do I remove the partitions that do not belong to Ubuntu?
How can they be renamed so that the / is /dev/sda1 rather than sda8?
Also, since I have 8gb of RAM, shouldnt the swap partition be of a size of at least 16gb? If so how can I resize that as well?
Let me know if you need further information.
Thanks in advance,
Luca

[oldfred]

Out of a 1TB drive Windows and Windows recovery are really small. I would hesitate to uninstall at this time as some systems need Windows 8 for some secure boot issues.

But you can make Windows a lot smaller. NTFS partition prefer to have about 30% free so that becomes the limit on how small to make it.

Swap will probably never be used. You just about have to load every application and edit large videos to use that much. If you hibernate you need swap to match RAM in GiB (not GB). And you really do not want to use swap as hard drive is orders of magnatude slower than RAM.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq

[lucacerone]

Thanks for your advice,
sorry if it took me some time to reply!
so you would just resize the partitition??

[oldfred]

Use Windows disk tools to shrink the NTFS partition and reboot so it can run chkdsk or make repairs due to resize.

Do both systems currently boot ok?

One advantage of gpt is that you can add partitions and not worry about primary and logical, so you can create another partition or move partitions. But move can be time consuming and may be a bit more risky as any power failue or interruption will corrupt data so have good backups.