Partition neatness and order question ?

[kwhiskerz]

On June 19, 2007 10:49:27 Jeff Voskamp wrote:
> William Case wrote:
> > Hi;
> >
> > 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         boot
> >  6      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.
> >
> > This is simply a neatness fetish; the numbering is not presently causing
> > any problems to the actual opeation of F-7.  Am I best just to leave it
> > alone, or is there a simple way or program that can re-number these
> > partitions?
>
> Partitions 1-4 are primary partitions defined in the partition table in
> sector 1 of the disk.
> Partitions 5 and up are logical partitions residing inside the extended
> partition.
> You can't simply renumber the partitions since you'd have to pull some
> out of the extended partition. However, using something like Partition
> Magic you could possibly shrink one or more of the larger ones, create
> partitions 2-4, copy over the contents and delete some of the higher
> numbered ones.  It would take a while and not really buy you anything,
> other than the nice numbering. :-)
>
> Jeff Voskamp

Actually, you can reorder the number very nicely with fdisk. Go into the 
advanced settings, x, and type f to fix the partition order. make sure to 
adjust fstab!