Safely remove unwanted partition

[alanrlow]

I originally setup my system with a 20gb ROOT partition (SDA1), an extended partition of 45gb (SDA3), in that I made my 45gb HOME (SDA5), a 5gb SWAP (SDA4) and a 80gb (SDA2) partition for stuff.
I now have emptied the 80gb (SDA2) partition, shrunk it and expanded my HOME into its space and would like to now remove it completely.
My question is, would this cause problems because the partitions would then be renamed because of the changed order.
Thanks for any help.

[nujinini]

Hi!

Can you kindly post the output of:

$ sudo fdisk -l (l is small L)

Thanks!

[alanrlow]

Hi!

Can you kindly post the output of:

$ sudo fdisk -l (l is small L)

Thanks!

Sure;

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x2780e52d

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 2680 21519256+ 83 Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 19325 19457 1068322+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 2680 18828 129716622 5 Extended
/dev/sda4 18829 19324 3984120 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda5 2680 18828 129716590+ 83 Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order


Hope this helps, thanks.

[devils casper]

You will have to edit /etc/fstab file after using 80GB Partition. Post the contents of /etc/fstab file and output of df -h command here.

df -h
cat /etc/fstab

[alanrlow]

You will have to edit /etc/fstab file after using 80GB Partition. Post the contents of /etc/fstab file and output of df -h command here.

df -h
cat /etc/fstab

Thanks for the reply.

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 21G 9.3G 10G 48% /
none 993M 328K 993M 1% /dev
none 1001M 488K 1000M 1% /dev/shm
none 1001M 204K 1000M 1% /var/run
none 1001M 0 1001M 0% /var/lock
none 1001M 0 1001M 0% /lib/init/rw
none 21G 9.3G 10G 48% /var/lib/ureadahead/debugfs
/dev/sda5 122G 67G 50G 58% /home

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid -o value -s UUID' to print the universally unique identifier
# for a device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name
# devices that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=f8b97ebd-cb8b-424c-9087-9564da8d8a9d / ext3 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /home was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=9b8cd886-4f02-49f1-abf9-eafbcf0e894f /home ext3 defaults 0 2
# swap was on /dev/sda4 during installation
UUID=74d7e20b-ecfa-4479-9adb-80e8ee45a2cf none swap sw 0 0

I did have an entry for SDA2 which I commented out with a #. As of today I have done a new install (I have home on its own partition) and obviously the fstab has been rewritten and the line is no longer there. Does this mean I can remove the partition? Well, absorb it into my home partition anyway.
Hope this helps.

[elija]

Personally I wouldn't get rid of the partition at all. I would mount it in a directory under my home and use it to store documents.

I do this on my main desktop with a second internal hard drive that gets mounted as ~/me/Documents/ If you already have data under your Documents directory, you will need to move it before mounting something else in there.

I don't have a separate partition of home directories as I find it causes more trouble than it is worth when multi-booting. Having a separate data partition gives all of the advantages of a separate home partition and none of the headaches.

[alanrlow]

Personally I wouldn't get rid of the partition at all. I would mount it in a directory under my home and use it to store documents.

I do this on my main desktop with a second internal hard drive that gets mounted as ~/me/Documents/ If you already have data under your Documents directory, you will need to move it before mounting something else in there.

I don't have a separate partition of home directories as I find it causes more trouble than it is worth when multi-booting. Having a separate data partition gives all of the advantages of a separate home partition and none of the headaches.

It's not really any good for anything, it's only 1gb in size, actually about 880mb.

I don't multi boot and a separate partition for home makes new installs a breeze. Today I installed 64bit Ultimate Edition Ubuntu over the top of 32bit and was back up with all my data intact in 45 min.

[elija]

Totally missed "shrunk it and expanded my HOME into its space"

If you don't multiboot then a spearate home doesn't give the same headaches as when you do; so that is fine.

When you do multiboot, with a separate home directory you have to use a different user for each distro you are running or you run the risk of multiple distros overwriting config files with incompatible versions. Having learned that the hard wayI decided to change my strategy to a separate data partition with each distro having a single partition (+ swap)