[ubuntu-uk] ubuntu-uk Digest, Vol 61, Issue 71

[Rowan Berkeley]

On Tue, 2010-05-25 at 13:06 +0100, Colin Law <clanlaw at googlemail.com>
wrote:
> On 25 May 2010 12:29, Rowan Berkeley <rowan.berkeley at googlemail.com>
> wrote:
> > On Tue, 2010-05-25 at 12:00 +0100, Colin Law
> <clanlaw at googlemail.com>
> > wrote:
> >> Just to clarify to the OP, when a partition is moved using gparted
> >> the data in the partition is moved with it, so this can be done 
> >> without affecting an existing system. ?It is always wise to ensure
> >> backups are up to date before embarking on this sort of operation
> >> however. One never knows when one is going to hit the wrong key or
> >> click the wrong partition. Also I imagine that granny tripping over
> >> the power lead in the middle of moving a partition might be 
> >> unfortunate for the data integrity as well as granny. Colin
> > But that wouldn't work with the swap partition, would it? I can't 
> > just unmount that, move it down the disk, and mount it again?
> It won't be mounted, when you boot off the live CD nothing on your
> hard disk will be mounted.  It will not be using the swap there.  You
> can boot off the live CD with no disk at all, or even one with Windows
> on it! Colin
Quite so, but I meant, not using a Live CD, just working from the
computer's own resident OS, which is all in sda1, the boot volume. My
idea was that while, necessarily, leaving that volume mounted, I can
unmount and delete, recreate -- or, as I thought you were suggesting,
move -- the other volumes without any difficulties.

It does occur to me though that if I were to rename the new partitions,
there might be files other than fstab and resume that would need
altering accordingly. There might be other files that assume that the
swap partition is sda3, and that the Home folder is in sda5, and would
not be able to find them. So I would need a complete list of files that
point to either the partition names or the UUIDs of the swap partition,
and the Home folder, and its menu contents such as Documents, Music,
Pictures, Video, etc.