If you want to be professional about this, (or perhaps that should be "doing things the easy way"), as well as making backups I would highly recommend getting a Gparted Live CD or USB stick if you can boot from that and prefer the USB format. Gparted is a marvellous application for messing around with partitions and has helped me out more often than I can count.

I think LVM's are without doubt "the future" for this sort of stuff but I've only ever looked at them in VM's - my host system is stuck in the past in that respect, (as well as me), I am constantly meaning to go the LVM route but I now have such a lot of storage, (by my standards anyway), I always put it off! I think undoubtedly the main thing is backup important stuff before you mess around, then get the Gparted live CD and, while you're at it, think about the LVM option.

1 members found this post helpful.

After making partition changes the partition numbering may change. If that happens will have to edit /etc/fstab and fix your bootloader to reflect the changes.

1 members found this post helpful.

Me, I would delete sda5 & sda6 and create a single partition in the space left behind.
Next I would "cp -a /dev/sda7/* /dev/sda?/" (? being the number of the new partition) and "tar" sda8 and also store this on the new partition.
I am now free to delete sda7 & sda8 and create a single partition in their place.
Finally, "untar" the sda8 file placing it in the last created partition.

Hello:

Note: I am an inexperienced linux user.

Before I did anything, I did 'dd' back ups of sda7 & sda8 and accepted the fact that I might have to totally reinstall Slackware, again.

Here is exactly what I finally did:

1. Booted my PC with my Parted Magic 5.9 CD
2. Used CloneZilla (in Parted Magic) to clone /dev/sda7 & then /dev/sda8 to my external USB drive
3. Used the Parted Magic partitioning tool to delete sda5, sda6, sda7 & sda8
4. Used the Parted Magic partitioning tool to create: sda5 (2GB), sda6 (2GB), sda7 (40GB) & sda8 (80GB)
5. Used ClonzeZilla (in Parted Magic) to restore the images for sda7 & sda8
6. Rebooted, logged into Slackware & wrote this.

I recreated sda5 & sda6 so, I hoped, that my Grub menu (I am using Grub not LILO) on the MBR would still function - I am here so, I guess it does!

During the restore process, CloneZilla issued some warning messages about 'Grub' but I guess they did not matter to my configuration.

I also noted that CloneZilla ran 'resize2fs' as part of its' restore process.

Marking this as SOLVED. (I hope.)

Thanks to all for your advice and guidance,

Cool. I'm glad that worked out for you!