A Quick Question About Backing Up for Repartitioning

[Cabhan]

Hope the topic is specific enough .

Basically, when I first partitioned my new hard drive, I didn't think it through too well. I currently have only 3 partitions (swap, /boot, and /). I would like to change this.

However, I already have a ton of stuff on those partitions.

Therefore, simply because I've not done this before, and sadly, I am worried about Microsoft Syndrome, is it possible to simply create a huge partition on my hda, copy over all the files from hdb into one big partition, perform repartitioning on hdb, and copy everything back into their respective partitions?

As long as I remount everything properly, there shouldn't be any issues with symlinks, I don't think.

But basically, will this cause irreparable damage or will it be painless, though with uber-long copy times?

[superdan7]

As long as you copy everything back to the original directory you should be fine. Linux is looking for the absolute pathway, not the fact that it will be partitioned.