[wellylug] Partition Tweaking

Ian Beardslee itb at falcons.co.nz
Wed Mar 22 17:54:12 NZST 2006


Ok so I've made the switch but I would still like to keep my Windows
partition 'alive' for a bit longer.

Currently /dev/hdb looks a bit like this ...

  Name    Flags   Part Type  FS Type            Size (MB)
---------------------------------------------------------
    hdb1          Primary    Hidden W95 FAT32     1077.52
                  Pri/Log    Free Space          37877.42
    hdb2  Boot    Primary    NTFS                20012.11
                  Pri/Log    Free Space           1069.29

Now it would be good to be able to get what is hdb2 so it is still hdb2
but is adjacent to hdb1.

I've been able to successfully use GParted to copy NTFS partitions - in
fact what is currently hdb2 is a (working) copy of what was hdb3
(although I haven't got around to permanenttly adjusting grub's menu.lst
or windows boot.ini yet).

If I make another copy of hdb2 and put it adjacent to hdb1 it'll be
called hdb3.  If I do the copy and then delete hdb2, how easy is it to
edit things so that hdb3 becomes hdb2?

The other option is to make a copy (hdb3), delete hdb2, make a small
partition (hdb2), copy hdb3 to make hdb4 and then delete hdb3 and hdb2
and make a copy of hdb4 to get hdb2 adjacent to hdb1.  That involves
lots of copying of partitions potentially each with extra chances to
fubar things.

All this to bring those bits of Free Space back together.

Any bright ideas?

Ian





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