This is the fifth installment of a series of posts to document “How I recovered my Linux systems…” See the first post and second post for the preliminaries, the third post for diagnostics and disassembly, the fourth post for reassembly and hardware checkout…
Disk partitioning is one of those things that most of us can and do take for granted — it’s usually done for us by whoever built our PC and installed the operating system for the first time. It’s a foundation concept that applies equally to Linux, Mac, Windows and other PC operating system environments, and yet, once “somebody else” does it for a particular PC, the owner/user accepts it and almost never monkeys with it any further. Why? Changing a disk’s partitioning often (but not always) involves the complete re-formatting of an existing partition, and when that happens, you’re effectively deleting all data files on that drive partition — you’d better have great, verified backups (for example, local-at-hand backup directories on another at-home system, or a great remote-in-the-cloud backup service like CrashPlan.com) at hand when you undertake any disk re-partitioning exercise.
As a result, these considerations make disk partitioning seem dangerous and difficult to the uninitiated — fortunately, it’s really not. All it takes is intention, care and planning; generally, you’re not going to “delete stuff by mistake,” as you’ve got to take several steps with intention, ultimately clicking an “Apply these changes” button before anything destructive happens to your disk drive. Using a partition editor for “just looking” is harmless, and it takes malice and forethought to do any unintended damage.