Saikee's post/thread

How to migrate XP, Vista, Linux, BSD and Solaris to a bigger hard disk

is simply the best one I've read after hours of googling about what I'm trying to do. I didn't want to lose my configured, fully updated OS and apps, along with passwords, user id, cookies, etc. etc. etc.. I'm so happy that this didn't cause a re-install. Mostly what I found was info about users with a m$ product and linux. I don't like to use M$, so I have only Linux for the last 3 years.

A little background: I have a 20 gig drive, jumpered as slave and sitting on the cable as primary/slave.

As of November 28, 2007 I had a "bare metal" never-before-used 320 gig drive, jumpered cable select and sitting on the cable as primary/master.

Using G4L (formerly Ghost 4 Linux) I cloned the partitions and data from the slave to the master. It worked excellently.

mark@Lexington:~$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000080

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 2040 16386268+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 2307 2434 1028160 5 Extended
/dev/sda3 * 2041 2306 2136645 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 2435 38913 293017567+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda5 2328 2434 859446 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 2307 2327 168619+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Disk /dev/sdb: 20.0 GB, 20020396032 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2434 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000080

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 2040 16386268+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 2307 2434 1028160 5 Extended
/dev/sdb3 * 2041 2306 2136645 83 Linux
/dev/sdb5 2328 2434 859446 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb6 2307 2327 168619+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

As you can see, with the exception of /dev/sda4 the two drives are identical. What I want to do is change ("move or re-allocate") /dev/sda4's space (approx. 297GiB) to /dev/sda1. The problem is that GParted LiveCD won't "resize/move" without creating another partition of about 4 gig. I would prefer not to create even more partitions, unnecessarily.

It was possible to do all the foregoing because my motherboard allows me to select which hard disk to "prioritize" for booting. At first, it was set to the drive sitting as primary/slave.