Re: control of partition numbers

[Andrew Clausen]

On Mon, Dec 30, 2002 at 02:58:15AM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> [I'm new to parted, and when I use it, I'm very task-oriented.  So
> perhaps I've missed a way to do this.]
> 
> Sometimes I wish to control the partition number of a partition that
> I've just created or modified.  At least with logical partitions, this
> seemed very difficult (I don't know whether this applies to primary
> partitions).
> 
> To be more specific, I found that I needed to delete and recreate a
> partition.  One side effect was that it lost its number and became the
> last.  I could not think of a way of restoring its old number that did
> not involve deleting and recreating all the partitions which
> previously had higher numbers.
> 
> I think that it should be easy to add a command that would allow
> control, but awkwardly.  It would exchange the position of two
> partitions, but not change them in any other way.
> 
> A more convenient command would accept a permutation to apply to
> partition numbers.  (Any permutation can be specified by a sequence of
> pairwise exchanges.)
> 
> I guess that all 4 primary possible partitions should be treated as
> existing in some sense (I understand that there are entries for all
> four, but non-existent ones are specially marked).

It is rather difficult to implement this.  There are some combinations
that are illegal.  Also, remember that Parted supports many different
types of partition tables.  What you're saying is probably doable,
but I haven't been able to find a simple clean solution yet.

BTW, how would users specify the permutation?  Could you give
some pseudo-screenshots?

Cheers,
Andrew