[CALUG] resizing a partition with parted, no need to preserve data?

[Ed Browne]

Hello,
    I'm trying to clean up a balkanized hard drive by merging two
partitions which formerly held a bootable OS, /dev/sda6 and /dev/sda7.
  They are consecutive, so I deleted the second one, sda7 (note that
my current Ubuntu install was on /dev/sda8, but it became /dev/sda7,
so that one will have to be remain untouched.)  This is the partition
table now:


   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1         702     5632000   27  Unknown
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2   *         702         893     1536000    7  HPFS/NTFS
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda3             893        6758    47109375    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda4            6759       12161    43399597+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5            9215        9477     2100481   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6            9477       10593     8972271   83  Linux
/dev/sda7            6759        9106    18860247   83  Linux
/dev/sda8            9107        9214      867478+  82  Linux swap / Solaris


I want to expand sda6 to reclaim blocks 10,594-12,161, but nothing
I can do with "parted" works:

root at bongo:~# parted
GNU Parted 1.7.1
Using /dev/sda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) check 6
Error: File system has an incompatible feature enabled.
(parted) resize 6 9477 12161
Error: File system has an incompatible feature enabled.
(parted) quit
Information: Don't forget to update /etc/fstab, if necessary.

root at bongo:~# uname -a
Linux bongo 2.6.24-21-generic #1 SMP Mon Aug 25 17:32:09 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux
root at bongo:~#                      

I don't need to preserve any data on /dev/sda6 (I made a new
file system several times, because I read that ext3 did not
support resizing, but the result was no better with ext2
or reiserfs.)

Can I do it with fdisk just by deleting the sda6 partition, 
and making a new sda6 partition that uses all the available
space?    Is there a smart way to do this?

Thanks in advance - Ed 



      
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