Mount External USB Drive w/ Existing Partitions

[GnomeProject]

For those of you that are thinking there are numerous posts on this subject and that I haven't read them all, well I have and this is indeed a novel question, so there, ;-p.

Alright, now for my question. Well I have a brand new external USB hard drive that now holds my old laptop hard drive with existing Linux partitions (ie. / , /boot, and swap). Now, my question is, how can I delete that swap space and the boot sector and create a new partition with that area of the drive and conserve the existing / directory??? Then, I want to take these partions and automount them when my laptop starts up??? Any suggestions? I probably have to make some sort of symlink or alias to the / partition since I already have one on my current laptop hard drive, don't I? Thanks for all your suggestions. Below you will find my current drive configuration and fstab file:

FSTAB:

LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
LABEL=/home /home ext3 defaults 1 2
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
LABEL=/usr /usr ext3 defaults 1 2
LABEL=/var /var ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hda6 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sda /mnt/usbdrive ext3 user,auto,rw 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0


and now for the hard drives:

/dev/hda
/dev/hda1 /boot (1)
/dev/hda2 / (1)
/dev/hda3 /var
/dev/hda4
/dev/hda5 /usr
/dev/hda6 swap (1)
/dev/hda7 /home

/dev/sda
/dev/sda1 /boot (2)
/dev/sda2 / (2)
/dev/sda3 swap (2)


Thanks all!!!

-Adam


BTW: This is my 100th post!!!!!

[mdwatts]

Use fdisk and delete /dev/sda3 and then recreate using fdisk and format with mkfs.ext2 -j /dev/sda3 (for ext3)?

[GnomeProject]

1) Use fdisk to delete both swap and /boot by issueing the following from a command prompt????

fdisk /dev/sda3

fdisk /dev/sda1

2)Then create them again...

mkfs.ext3 -j /dev/sda3

mkfs.ext3 -j /dev/sda1

Is that correct, or do I do something else? Can I run fdisk from a command prompt inside my current workspace without worry? Can I rename those partitions something else during that process, if so when? Thanks.

-Adam

[mdwatts]

The /boot you can probably just reformat with mkfs... , but the swap partition will need to be deleted with fdisk and then a partition recreated in it's place again using fdisk and then format with mkfs ...

And yes you should be able to do all this within your workspace at the commandline.

[GnomeProject]

First let me say thanks for quick response...


But, is there an easy way just to delete the partitions while I am logged in under Gnome then just merge them with the / partition??? Thanks.

[mdwatts]

Use GNU Parted (http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/) (it may already be installed) to delete those partitions and then to resize '/'.

Or copy the contents of /dev/sda2 to your HD, delete all, recreate, format and then copy everything back.

Up to you though.