build

[quick snow]

Trying to prepare a partition on my windows secondary ssd for debian and I worry I partitioned it (within windows) in the wrong way. How do I get rid of the partition on the right without deleting the data on the left part of it?

[quiet cradle]

have you tried this before, is that why you have an unidentified partition on the right?

Can't say for sure without knowing why you have a 60gb partition with an unknown-to-windows filesystem. Or no filesystem at all.

regardless, whatever is in D:\ should be safe. If you just shrank the partition with this tool, then it will have done it properly.

[quick snow]

i shrank D initially but i have no idea why it has the other one on the right - is there a way to check?

[quiet cradle]

uhhh, windowss...... run these commands and send a screenshot of the output:

diskpart
list disk
select disk [whichever disk holds D:\ ]
list partition

[quick snow]

Partition ### Type Size Offset

---

Partition 1 Reserved 15 MB 17 KB
Partition 2 Primary 677 GB 16 MB
Partition 3 Unknown 58 GB 872 GB

[quick snow]

I'm not sure if there's another way to look at it in more detail

maybe something happened when I defragged the drive?

DISKPART> DETAIL PARTITION

Partition 3
Type : 0fc63daf-8483-4772-8e79-3d69d8477de4
Hidden : Yes
Required: No
Attrib : 0000000000000000
Offset in Bytes: 937288531968

[quiet cradle]

Yeah, I think you've tried this before. I suspect that last partition is already a linux install

Previously, Linux used the same GUID for the data partitions as Windows (Basic data partition: EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7). Linux never had a separate unique partition type GUID defined for its data partitions. This created problems when dual-booting Linux and Windows in UEFI-GPT setup. The new GUID (Linux filesystem data: 0FC63DAF-8483-4772-8E79-3D69D8477DE4) was defined jointly by GPT fdisk and GNU Parted developers.[47] It is identified as type code 0x8300 in GPT fdisk.

Found that by searching the type guid: 0fc63daf-8483-4772-8e79-3d69d8477de4

[quick snow]

could it be a virtualbox thing?

[quiet cradle]

Probably not, I am not sure if you can give a vbox virtual machine a single partition. Usually you need to give a whole disk device. What you can do is boot up the debian live environment, then before installing, try mounting that mystery partition on /mnt, if there's nothing there, then you can either leave it if you're still not sure, or delete it and use all of the free space for the partition for your Linux install.