how to delete an partition

qanopus · 12-03-2002, 03:38 AM

Hi, I have a partition that was used as a boot partition on my previus linux system. That partition is'nt used any more. How to savly get rid of this partition? If I simply delete it with fdisk, won't the numbers of the other partitions change? If that happens I'l get a kernel panic when I boot in to linux again. I could give a "root=" option to lilo, but won't things be broken?
So my question is, how do I safely delete a partiton?

acid_kewpie · 12-03-2002, 03:48 AM

well you should use the e2label program to give the partitions you are using descriptive names, so you can call them by name and not their partition number. eg:

Code:

LABEL=/        /             ext2    defaults              1 1
LABEL=/boot    /boot         ext2    defaults              1 2
LABEL=/usr     /usr          ext2    defaults              1 1

and then it's not a problem anymore. not sure about swap partitions though. i guess you could always let it fail easily enough and change it later.

qanopus · 12-03-2002, 08:12 AM

I don't quite understand what I have to do. I looked at the man page of e2label and think it says to give an device a label you should do :
"e2label /dev/hda4 root" (hda4 is my root). Is this right? Then what? Can I call on "root" in fstab instead of /dev/hda4 ? So then My fstab should look something like :

root / ext2 errors=remount-ro 0 1

instead of

/dev/hda4 / ext2 errors=remount-ro 0 1

Is this right?

acid_kewpie · 12-03-2002, 08:16 AM

uh huh, run something like "mount -l" to list the labels of the partitions (assuming they are already mounted) just to check you've got the right name.

what you do to fstab is copy my example.... LABEL= etc...