1 Topic by Piscium

  • Piscium
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2010-05-30
  • Posts: 12

Topic: Partitions renumbered

I have used gparted live cd v. 0.4.5-3 to add, delete and resize partitions quite a few times. It was always reliable, and I never noticed it renumbering existing partitions.

Today I used gparted live cd v. 0.5.2-9 for the first time. I chose several partitions for deletion, and after I applied the change the remaining logical partitions on that disk were renumbered. For example /dev/sdb15 became /dev/sdb8. I was not expecting this.

What is the expected behaviour in this case?

2 Reply by gedakc

  • gedakc
  • Developer
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2007-11-30
  • Posts: 4,593

Re: Partitions renumbered

Unfortunately this is the expected behaviour with logical partitions.  Logical partitions are chained from one to another.  By deleting one partition in the chain, all following logical partitions will experience a partition number reduction by one.

Each logical partition has an Extended Boot Record in front of the partition.  These EBR's are used to chain from one partition to another.  For a description of how this works, please refer to details on the Extended Boot Record.

You can review the GParted manual for an example of this behaviour:
GParted Manual - Deleting a Partition

3 Reply by Piscium

  • Piscium
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2010-05-30
  • Posts: 12

Re: Partitions renumbered

Hi Gedak,

Thanks. I read what you suggested and I understand it now.

P.