Dear all,

Is that possible to merge the 2 ext3 partitions without moving data in the old partitions? What i did was, i created new partition say /dev/hda8, which is to be merged to some old partition say /dev/hda3. Is this possible?

Thanks in Advance...
Franklin

IMO, the best way would be to back your data up, remove hda8, and resize hda3. I also found an article for you, it may help without the need to lose all of your data. http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_resi...xt3_partitions

Hope that helps,

Josh

Short answer, NO.

Even worse if these are not LVM (or btrfs or zFS or the like). To enlarge a "normal" partition needs contiguous space following the partition. You may need to organise that as well.
Do-able, but can get messy.

I think you need to resize the partition /dev/hda3, to make room to contain all data. This will, most probably, require to modify (shrink, move etc) other partitions.

It is safer to keep backup, because every operation that modifies partitioning is potentially dangerous for the data (hardware failure, power failure, software bugs, even bad connectors and cables could corrupt the filesystem).

I had to do this myself on a 750GB external USB drive, almost full with 3 partitions on it. I took some days to backup and restore the data, and just a few minutes to delete 2 partitions + 1 extended, and expand the remaining first partition of the drive! I had no problem, so I needed to restore the contents of the old 2nd and 3rd partitions only. Nevertheless, even the 1st partition was safe this manner.

Merging partitions is long ago an asked feature for GParted. However, it isn't simple at all: what to do with file/folder permissions, with files or directories with identical names, what to do in case of different filesystems, etc.