Practically every tutorial on the internet for dual booting Steam OS and Windows on Deck tells you to use the Steam Deck recovery image to shrink the home partition so you can make a new partition for Windows. I did this first try on my previous Steam Deck, but I had to send that one back to Valve because of hardware problems. On this one, Steam OS just dies every time I shrink the home partition. Trying to boot it gets me stuck on an endless Steam Deck logo screen. It’s so bad that re-installing Steam OS doesn’t even work and I have to reimage the system. Is there something that I’m likely doing wrong?
If you’re reflashing the whole drive anyway, partition it before you start.
try shrinking partition before installing something. doing partition with the os installed is like eating a whole cake and then trying to cut it with a knife inside ya belly
If I alter the partition in any way it won’t let me install Steam OS anymore.
I found the problem. It turns out that my mistake was trusting KDE Partition Manager. GParted Live worked first time.
Were you trying to adjust it while it was mounted?
Best to do it offline. Also, FYI, KDE Partition Manager and GParted both use parted to make changes.
No, I was running it from the Steam Deck recovery image on a flash drive. It would consistently say things like “aborted due to error”, whereas it worked instantly with GParted Live. It definitely wasn’t mounted because if it is, it doesn’t even let you make changes.