1 Topic by Vexed

  • Vexed
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Topic: The numbering of logicals may not match position.

Any chance of having a look at the way Gparted works with logical partitions, so that the numeric number of a partition matches it physical position on the drive.

When you delete a logical partition all following partitions have their numbers changed as all the partition tables are altered to chain-link to the next. When the deleted partition is recreated it is not slotted back into the chain-link, but added to the end with the last logical becoming the one linking to it. So for example a partition of say sda8 can turn into sda20, even when it is still the 7th partition on the drive.

Thankfully when cloning with Gparted it has the option to paste into existing partitions, which retains the logical progression. But when I forget or when reorganizing partitions I have to use another tool to restore order. Some of the third party boot managers I use have problems when things are out of sync.

My apologies if this has already been mentioned - or even fixed in the new release!
Cheers
Sam.

2 Reply by gedakc

  • gedakc
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Re: The numbering of logicals may not match position.

As you mentioned, the best way to avoid changing logical device numbers is to never delete a logical partition.  You can reformat the partition as a different file system, or copy an existing file system and paste it into the logical partition.

The command line tool fdisk has an option to renumber logical partitions in disk order if you with to try that.

GParted uses the libparted library from the parted project to edit partition tables.  If the ability to renumber logical partitions is added to parted, then we can investigate setting up the appropriate function calls with in GParted.

Hence you might wish to request such a feature from the parted project.

3 Reply by Vexed

  • Vexed
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Re: The numbering of logicals may not match position.

Thanks for clarifying,  I’ll throw off a request to the developers of Parted. I assume by fdisk you mean the Microsoft DOS tool that was/is on a Win98 startup floppy?

Sam.

4 Reply by class413

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Re: The numbering of logicals may not match position.

I assume by fdisk you mean the Microsoft DOS tool that was/is on a Win98 startup floppy?

Not exactly. It is the Linux/Unix  "fdisk", that is able to handle much more partition types than the one used by msdos.
It is one of the basic Linux tools and is included in every Linux distribution.

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***