I used to run my system from a 120 GB drive. The drive is partitioned as follows:
partition size type filesystem
--------- ---- ---- ----------
/dev/hda1 16M primary ext2
/dev/hda2 3.7G primary ext3
/dev/hda3 1.5G primary Linux swap
/dev/hda4 (extended) /dev/hda5 3.7G logical ext3
/dev/hda6 3.7G logical ext3
/dev/hda7 15G logical ext3
/dev/hda8 28G logical ext3
/dev/hda9 28G logical ext3
/dev/hda10 28G logical ext3
Now I no longer need partitions 1 through 7. I'd like to roll them up into one partition, or even better, add them to partition 7 (so I'd have four, roughtly equally-sized partitions). That in mind, I do NOT want to lose the data on partitions 8, 9, and 10.
Will the available partioning tools (e.g. GNU parted) allow me to do this safely? If so, would it take a long time? I have another 120 GB drive in a second computer; I could just use rsync to make a backup of everything, then go to work with fdisk if that would be safer and/or faster.
I did this same kind of thing using parted, well qtparted, on my system. In your case, I would delete 1-6. Then do a partition copy to copy 7 to the beginning of the drive. Delete the old 7. Resize new 1 to fill empty space. The copy step is necessary due to parted not supporting resizing backwards. It can resize as long as the starting point remains the same. Depending on how much data you actually need to backup, it may be quicker to use rsync and fdisk. YMMV.
-- Andrew Gaffney
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