[Leaplist] Recombining a divided and Formatting a hard disk

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Sun, 9/21/08, Chris <Chris at NeptunePCTech.com> wrote:
> It's hardly worth validating Phil, he won't lead you
> off track, but for what it's worth, I did exactly this
> just a few weeks ago. I used the GPartEd livecd, and
> it worked just as Phil described. I had some incorrect
> notion stuck in my head that deleting the first partition
> was a bad thing,

Some closed source OSes and utilities take issues if the
slices (partitions) in any disk label (partition table)
are not sequentially enumerated and contiguous.  But most
NT-based kernels are much better, unlike prior DOS-based
implementations.

> but in this case, I had a full backup, and nothing to
> lose but time, so I tried it, and it was much faster and
> easier than restoring a USB drive backup and re-installing.

Between LiveCDs with GParted and other options that use
the standard Linux resizing/moving utilities as well as
LVM2 which can do "live" resizing of even root filesystems,
today I consider Linux and Linux-based options to be far
more trusted and reliable than 3rd party, closed source
options.

> In my case, I was dealing with only primary partitions -
> I don't know what happens if your ext2/3 partitions are
> logical partitions inside an extended partition. Perhaps
> you first have to expand the extended partition, then
> expand the ext2/3 logical partition(s) inside of it.

In this case, it was removing the Windows C: drive, which
pretty much always needs to be a legacy BIOS/DOS Disk Label
slice (one of the first four partitions, aka "Primary" aka
"Basic Disc" -- when not in a LDM Disk Label aka "Dynamic
Disc").  But there is little difference when the slice is
in a DOS "Extended" Disk Label, which isn't a very
complicated setup.  It just takes up a sector, although that
takes a sector away from the first logic slice (which may
be an issue when sizing two slices on cylinder boundaries).

For the most part, nothing else is really different.
Changing the "Extended" info is simple.  E.g., I've deleted
entire "Extended" table and re-created it larger or smaller,
including not changing the geometry on select "Logical"
slices in it.  Again, the only issue I ever run into is
when I use cylinders as my boundaries, the first "Logical"
slice will be one sector less than its normal cylider *
heads * sectors size.


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