Partition table entries are not in disk order

[Steven Susbauer]

Mouse Rusty wrote:
> I have just found that my partition table are not in disk order, Is
> anybody curious to know why?
> The netbook was pre-installed with SLED11 by HP and changed to ubuntu
> netbook 10.04 later by me. I have never re-partition it because I have
> to keep my home partition, the only possible operation is to re-format
> swap and root partition during ubuntu installation process.
>
> Could it be that, HP gives us such a strange partition table? and How
> to create it...
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>     Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/sda1            2613        3122     4096575   82  Linux swap / Solaris
> /dev/sda2   *           1        2612    20980858+  83  Linux
> /dev/sda3            3503       38913   284438857+  83  Linux
> /dev/sda4            3123        3502     3052350   83  Linux
>
> Partition table entries are not in disk order
>

It is possible to fix this with fdisk, but could possibly make your 
system unbootable depending on the fstab (see 
http://phlogma.com/linux/?p=4).

It is very easy to cause this as partition numbers are assigned in the 
order you create a partition, nor the location of the partition. If you 
create a partition farther into the disk and then create another 
partition before it (for example, if you create a swap at the end of a 
disk, root in the middle and boot at the beginning) they will be in a 
reversed order, your boot would be sda3.