1 Topic by GMB

  • GMB
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Topic: Ability to re-order the extended partition

This is a mega-important feature that I am surprised is not present, unless I missed how to do it....

I would like it to be able to change the linkage of the extended partitions so the logical order is changed.
This is a totally killer if you do what I just did....

Situation: complex load of partitions and a boot loader installed from somewhere.
What I did: I deleted a partition from the extended area. A second later I realized my terrible mistake! I just renumbered all the devices as Linux would see them. Now a load of stuff no longer works!

So I quickly put the partition back.
AAAARRRGGGGGH.... it linked it onto the end of the chain - so this hasn't helped!!!
Several hours later I managed to reconfigure everything back to working again (I hope).

It would be good if there was an option to say where a new partition should go in the chain, and even better to have a way to edit this when it turns out wrong.

2 Reply by gedakc

  • gedakc
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Re: Ability to re-order the extended partition

Newer GNU/Linux distributions use the file system UUID for mounting, thus avoiding the need to have an exact number for the partition.  You might wish to investigate this further so you can avoid having to specify a logical partition number.

See also the GParted Manual - Changing a Partition UUID to learn more about UUIDs.

3 Reply by GMB

  • GMB
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Re: Ability to re-order the extended partition

Yes, I noticed that some do that now so it wasn't as complete a disaster as I was expecting.
But also my boot loader itself doesn't (well on my machine that is the case). So it left me with a machine that didn't know how to boot. For silly reasons (not relevant here) it was rather hard to fix this. It would have been so much easier to just put it back like things had been - but no way to do that.

So I think it would be a nice feature to have.
I don't like programs that let you do something that the program itself cannot undo by any means, especially for a situation like this where nothing much has actually been lost.
It is all very well to say "don't forget to back everything up" but I haven't found a way to recover the 24 hours of down time that the backup/restore actually takes, such is the size of modern discs.