Re: giving a partition a new number

[Andrew Clausen]

On Thu, Mar 11, 2004 at 09:38:00PM +0000, Ketil Froyn wrote:
> I have a laptop with a dual windows/linux (redhat 9, parted 1.6.3) setup
> on it. I have a problem I was hoping to fix with parted. Here is the
> layout of my hard drive:
> 
> (parted) p
> Disk geometry for /dev/hda: 0.000-28615.781 megabytes
> Disk label type: msdos
> Minor    Start       End     Type      Filesystem  Flags
> 1          0.031   2047.346  primary   fat32       boot
> 2       2047.346  28615.781  extended              lba
> 5       2047.377  10048.469  logical   fat32
> 6      10048.500  10299.484  logical   ext3
> 7      10299.516  10801.516  logical   linux-swap
> 8      10801.547  28615.781  logical   ext3
> (parted)
> 
> As you can see, the extended partition is on partition 2, and the rest
> of the partitions are in the extended partition. I want some more
> primary partitions (primarily because this is a configuration that
> debian sarge had problems installing on, even though that is a problem
> the developers of the debian install process should look into as well),
> and if anything I would like to make partition 1 larger (windows is very
> dependent on space drive C:). Now, I guess I can resize the various
> partitions to make more space, but I can't figure out a way to move the
> extended partition number from 2 to 3 without destroying something. Any
> tips on how to do this with parted would be appreciated.

Why do you want to renumber it from 2 to 3?  You don't need to have
the minor numbers have the same order...  That said, what you're trying
to do looks rather painful...

In any case, I don't understand why sarge would have problems with it.

> Also, I haven't found any documentation saying whether partitions must
> be mounted read-only or not mounted when using parted. Resizing
> partitions on the running system just doesn't sound wise to me, is that
> really what I'm meant to do?

You must unmount.  (This is mentioned in the docs in the "Operating
Systems" section, although I will repeat this statement in other
sections as well).  Bootdisks might be helpful...

Cheers,
Andrew