First, I don't guarantee anything, so proceed at your own risk. Unless you are willing to lose what you have, it would be a
really good idea to backup what you have first. You could look into tools like
partimage,
Norton Ghost, or even plain old
dd for this. While I have successfully resized partitions, etc., once (for reasons unknown) I had things go wrong and I had to recover everything from backup.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rm_-rf_windows
Oh yeah! The 5GB ext3 data partition is the first of a series of logical partitions within my extended partition! Crap!! Perhaps a better idea would be to shrink the Windows partition to 45GB and leave the 5GB ext3 data partition as is...
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I would think this would be a little safer than your first proposal, because you would not have to move the beginning of the extended partition (I don't know if that would even be possible). While I don't know of any howtos to refer you to, I would think this should be straightforward; after deleting the second partition you should have both the partition table entry and disk space available for a new primary partition,
and it will be in the correct order.
Quote:
Another question. When I created this partition layout, it didn't let me create a third primary partition (even before having created the extended partition, I think!). I thought you were allowed up to 4 primary partitions. Can anybody offer a logical explanation for this? Might there be two hidden primary partitions within the Windows bit, one for boot and the other for data? I can't see it when I use different tools to see the partition layout...
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With the Linux tools I have used, I think all of the partitions should be visible. If you were using a Linux tool for partitioning (all bets are off with MS tools!), I can think of no reason why you should have had any problems creating a 3rd primary partition
unless you had already created the extended partition. You are correct than on x86 machines there are 4 entries in the primary partition table. It is possible to use all 4 for primary partitions if you don't need an extended partition.
In fact -- now that I think of it -- if there had been two hidden partitions, you would not have been able to create the extended partition, as that takes up an entry in the primary partition table.