Changing the number of an sd*# partition, is it possible?
 

Hey everyone,

I've recently made some changes in my partioning scheme in order to free up some space to try out another distro. It's now something like this, in an extended partition:

sda5 - swap
sda6 - / - distro 1
sda8 - / - distro 2
sda7 - /home, both distros

Now, the OCD in me is going a bit crazy at the sudden lack of order ;) So is there any way to switch up the numbers of the partitions? Making sda7 into sda8 and vice-versa?

Cheers

No, but you have the option to use uuid (/sbin/blkid) as partition identifier if you want

Or even labels - more human friendly.

So there's actually no way to change the sda number? How can it be so "set to stone"?

Of course it can be changed. You just have to hack the code that assigns the device nodes on boot (easy enough), and any code that follows the chaining for logical partitions. That adds up to a fair bit of code.
Or you delete the partitions and re-allocate in the order you want - how obsessive are you ?.

It's just an index, why pretend the 7th partition is the 8th partition, that would make no sense

I guess not obsessive enough to move around 500GB of data...

You can just delete entry in partition table (with logical partions on extended partition in mind) and recreate it with proper order. It is quite dangerous and some useless, how often you access drives by /dev/sda*.