problem cleaning up old drive

[Hakan Koseoglu]

nepal google said the following on 21/11/08 18:07:

Right now you don't have any swap partition in use. You can repartition your disk as you like w/o any harm albeit you are a bit low on memory. I advise you to create a swapfile somewhere.

Some people might say "swap files are slow". They aren't for a while but using swap partitions is always tidier.

> I understand using dd as above, but does this way use 
> 1gb of my root partition?
Yes. Once you are finished and have your swap partition back you can delete this file (after issuing swapoff against it).
If you have an other partition with more free space (a home partition for example) you can use that.
Simply any reasonably fast file system will do (so don't do it against a USB disk! :) )

> the reason I ask is that the partitions on this drive are 
> not in disk order and although I have about 40gb of 
> unused space, I'm afraid of screwing up their references 
> by adding another partition, but ideally I would prefer to 
> have it that way. Sorry for my dumbness on this.
If you have free space in your extended partition, you can create a swap partition there.
About partitions not being in order - there isn't such thing. :) I've created systems in all sorts of orders (albeit some sections of disks are faster than others and this can be taken into consideration in high performance configurations - not a case here).

As long as your systems use the UUIDs for mounting, you can't go wrong - at worst your Grub might get confused which is easy to fix. (I am still bewildered with the idea of such a complicated and featurefull load manager - what was wrong with Lilo! :) )