[arch-general] Change letters of partitions

[Sergey Manucharian]

On Sun, 13 Sep 2009 11:55:32 +0200
Damjan Georgievski <gdamjan at gmail.com> wrote:
> ...
> > How do I change home partition /dev/sda2 to /dev/sda3?
> 
> That's fairly easy but dangerous. With fdisk you first print the
> partition table, then delete sda2 and sda3, and recreate them with
> exactly the same begining and end sectors as sda3 and sda4.
> 
> Be very carefull

Yes, that's a good way and it works fine, if the partitions created by
good tools like fdisk itself or cfdisk. It happend to me that if a
partition starts not from a cylinder boundary (I haven't research this
issue though, maybe I'm wrong with the actual cause) you simply cannot
recreate it at the same place, therefore you will loose your partition.

The partition table is just 4 lines of data [0]. You can dd it in a
file, change the order of the lines and dd it back. There are some
ready-to-use tools too, like (commercial) PartitionMagic's Partition
table editor.

By the way, in some cases M$ Windows installer rewrites the partition
table putting those 4 lines in "acceding" order.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record