giving a partition a new number

[Ketil Froyn]

Hi,

I have a laptop with a dual windows/linux (redhat 9, parted 1.6.3) setup
on it. I have a problem I was hoping to fix with parted. Here is the
layout of my hard drive:

(parted) p
Disk geometry for /dev/hda: 0.000-28615.781 megabytes
Disk label type: msdos
Minor    Start       End     Type      Filesystem  Flags
1          0.031   2047.346  primary   fat32       boot
2       2047.346  28615.781  extended              lba
5       2047.377  10048.469  logical   fat32
6      10048.500  10299.484  logical   ext3
7      10299.516  10801.516  logical   linux-swap
8      10801.547  28615.781  logical   ext3
(parted)

As you can see, the extended partition is on partition 2, and the rest
of the partitions are in the extended partition. I want some more
primary partitions (primarily because this is a configuration that
debian sarge had problems installing on, even though that is a problem
the developers of the debian install process should look into as well),
and if anything I would like to make partition 1 larger (windows is very
dependent on space drive C:). Now, I guess I can resize the various
partitions to make more space, but I can't figure out a way to move the
extended partition number from 2 to 3 without destroying something. Any
tips on how to do this with parted would be appreciated.

Also, I haven't found any documentation saying whether partitions must
be mounted read-only or not mounted when using parted. Resizing
partitions on the running system just doesn't sound wise to me, is that
really what I'm meant to do?

Thanks.

Ketil