Hi,

on my linux server i had 15 partitions on /dev/sdb
i was no longer requiring partition9 (sdb9) hence i deleted it using fdisk. after that when i did a 'p' is showed me 14 partitions sdb1 to sdb14. This means after deleting sdb9, the original sdb10 has now automatically become sdb9. After this i created a new partition of 30 GB which now shows as sdb15 and i exited fdisk with option 'w'. Now althought the partition table has altered i need to reboot the machine before i can get the changes to take place.

My problem is, now that there is an upward shift in the partition numbers (sbd10 became sdb9 and so on until sdb15 became sdb14 and i created a new sdb15), the /etc/fstab still shows the old partition numbers mounting the old filesystems. If i reboot the machine wont i loose all my data with the filesystems being mounted on the wrong partitions?

please advice how i can go about rectifying this?

Well, usually, partitions would not be renumbered in this case... but supposing they were, you should be able to just update fstab and other partition-based references to reflect the new partitioning scheme.

Hi,

Thas what i thought i would do, but i am little nervous abt doing that and i want to be absolutely sure that i wont be loosing any data by doing that.

Any advice.

You won't lose any data. Depending on the details you might get a kernel panic on boot if / was relabeled. Things may not work if the references to them are now wrong. You might want to boot Knoppix and fix up fstab from there.

fdisk can fix the partition order by renumbering them based on their track start/end positions.