Partition neatness and order question ?

[Boy Hartsuiker]

William Case <billlinux at rogers.com> wrote:

> Over the last 3 Fedora installs, I have managed to get my partition
> numbers out of sequence. parted /dev/sdb returns:
> Number  Start   End     Size    Type      File system  Flags
> 1      8225kB  41.1GB  41.1GB  extended               lba 5      8258kB   
> 90.5MB  82.2MB  logical   ext3         boot6      90.5MB  1349MB   
> 1258MB  logical   linux-swap       7      1349MB  9739MB  8390MB   
> logical   ext3             8      9739MB  30.6GB  20.9GB  logical    
> ext3             9      30.6GB  41.1GB  10.5GB  logical   fat32 Starting  
> correctly with number 1 (sdb1) then jumps to 5 (sdb5).  How can
> I rename my partitions so that they go in sequence; sdb1, sdb2, ...
> sdb6.

It does that because the first partition is an extended partition (5-9 are  
contained in no. 1).
The maximum number of extended plus primary partitions on a single drive  
is 4 so it reserves 2-4
for the other 3 partitions that might be added later. This actually keeps  
the numbers in order
relative to the end and start of the partitions.
The numbers can only be changed if you repartition the disk. I suppose it  
CAN be done without
destroying the data on the disk, but it wouldn't be easy.

-- 
Boy Hartsuiker