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I have to change a logical partition in a primary partition. How can i do this? This is how my partition table looks like:

+320 GB Hard Disk 
 -System Reserved (105 MB NTFS (for Windows 7)) 
 -Windows 7 (107 GB NTFS)  
 +213 GB Extended (Contains logical partitions)
  -Files (107 GB NTFS)   
  -89 GB (this is the partition i want to change) (It is
my Mac OS Journaled partition)   
  -17 GB Linux Ext4   
  -773 MB Swap Space (for linux)

I have a Mac Pro with Mac 10.5.8, Win7, and Ubuntu 9.10. In the process between win7 and ubuntu my mac partition seems to have changed to logical. I dont know why, but now i cant access my Mac OS anymore. I dont feel like backing up everything (nor do i have space for that) and then reinstalling Mac. Can anyone help me? How can i change the logical partition to primary? If needed i can go into Windows, but i would like to do it in Ubuntu. Thanks.

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If you are going to modify the partitions of your disk, you are very well advised to do a backup. This is mostly a safe procedure but it can go wrong. Just let there be a power outage in the middle of the process and there you have the mess. So "not feeling like backing up everything" is the wrong attitude here :) – foraidt Jan 10 '10 at 9:52
@mxp; ok let's say i am going to backup; do you have an answer? – TutorialPoint Jan 10 '10 at 10:13
Just a note here... you probably want more than 773 mb of swap space for linux. While it is true that generally if you have lots of ram it hardly ever gets touched, having less than 2x your ram space -can- lead to system instability – Mala Jan 10 '10 at 12:46
@Mala - the swap space was generated automaticlly by the Linux installation. – TutorialPoint Jan 14 '10 at 16:36
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up vote 1 down vote accepted

If you're going to backup you can

  1. delete the logical OSX partition,
  2. move the Linux and swap partition forward,
  3. decrease the size of the logical partition,
  4. create a primary partition for OSX at the end of the disk,
  5. restore the backup of the OSX partition into the new OSX partition

This will get you a primary OSX partition. I'm not familiar with the OS so maybe adjustments to its equivalent of a boot manager and /etc/fstab have to be made in order to reflect the new partition numbers.

To keep your Linux system running, you may also have to account for the changed partition numbers of the Linux and swap partition.

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Thanks. Am going to try this. – TutorialPoint Jan 10 '10 at 15:36
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