/dev/sda2 < /dev/sda1

[foxmulder881]

Is it possible to change sda2 to sda1?

[MistaKa0s]

Originally Posted by foxmulder881

Is it possible to change sda2 to sda1?

what are you trying to do exactly?

sda depicts the physical drive, and the suffix is numbered based on the partitions from the start of the drive.
eg

|<------- sda ------ >|
|<-sda1->|<-sda2->|

[foxmulder881]

Yeah I know. But I'll explain what I done. I've ditched Windows for now and have Ubuntu only running. Before I removed Windows I had:

sda1 ntfs windows
sda2 ext3 ubuntu
sda3 extended
sda5 linux swap

Now it looks like this:

sda2 ext3 ubuntu
sda3 extended
sda5 linux swap

So all I was curious about, is can I change sda2 to read as sda1 without anything being damaged. Obviously I 'd have to change grub config, but that's no biggie.

[syx]

Doesnt that mean that there is another partition before your new sda2 ppartition ?

Fire up gparted (if you dont have it, sudo apt-get install gparted) to have a look.

I am half guessing here so dont bet your data on my advice yet :P

[MistaKa0s]

I think there's still a partition in front of sda2, otherwise it would've been picked up as sda1.

what does fdisk -l /dev/sda say?

You can probably merge sda1 and sda2 using parted (or qtparted/gparted etc), but sda1 should definitely still be there.

[foxmulder881]

No I removed sda1 because that's what partition Windows was installed on. And then I used GParted and grew sda2 from 80GB > 160GB to take over the freed space that was left by sda1.

chris@chris-desktop:~$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 163.9 GB, 163928604672 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19929 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x70855789

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda2               1       19752   158657908+  83  Linux
/dev/sda3           19753       19929     1421752+   5  Extended
/dev/sda5           19753       19929     1421721   82  Linux swap / Solaris

Exactly as I knew it was.

[syx]

Bugger me.

You'll need someone cleverer than me to answer then !

[Crinos]

You shouldn't rely on the numbers anyway... label the partitions and use that for mounting, e.g.

# e2label /dev/sda2 qwerty

/etc/fstab:
Replace
/dev/sda2    /mnt/qwerty    ext3    defaults    0 0
with:
LABEL=qwerty /mnt/qwerty    ext3    defaults    0 0

That's if you don't use LVM, then it's even better. Partition numbers are a crappy way to manage mounting filesystems, but in any case, it doesn't matter what number it is, as long as it's persistent...

[syx]

Does that mean that when you take some sata drives out and maybe plug them into different ports they still mount fine ?

Also does it mean you can reinstall the os and put that same line in fstab and it will pick up the label name from the drive ? Or is the label name stored in the os ?

Thanks

[BIPyjamas]

The label name is stored as part of the filesystem, so it's intrinsic to the disk.

I personally don't use labels as they don't tell me which partition is being used at a glance. It seems more intuitive to use LVM and name the logical partitions in a nice way such as /dev/VolGroup00/home as an example.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that labels are handy when you have multiple drives to prevent boot issues that might occur when udev feels like swapping your drive references around.

[Bort]

I've found the various sda1, sda2 labels just appear in the order the partitions were created. Following from ubuntu's practice, I use the UUID string to keep consistency in after moving around partitions.

[Drunkmunky]

UUID all the way

[foxmulder881]

Originally Posted by Bort

I've found the various sda1, sda2 labels just appear in the order the partitions were created. Following from ubuntu's practice, I use the UUID string to keep consistency in after moving around partitions.

This is exactly how it works and how it has worked out for me. It's not really a big deal anyway. I think I'll just leave it be for now, until I reinstall when Karmic goes gold.