Is it possible to move partitions in a special manner?

[01mf02]

I have the following partitioning scheme:

/dev/hda1 Windows XP (2 GB)
/dev/hda5 Documents, pictures, movies for Windows (10 GB)
/dev/hda6 Backup of own files (5 GB)
/dev/hda7 Gentoo boot partition (64 MB)
/dev/hda8 Swap partition (256 MB)
/dev/hda9 Gentoo itself (5 GB)
Free space (500 MB)

I have deleted my /dev/hda6 partition because I didn't need a backup anymore, so I had 5 GB of free space between my Windows partitions and my Linux ones. Some time later I ran out of disk space on gentoo, and I had to delete everything inside /usr/portage/distfiles/ and all in all, lack of disk space was very unfamiliar to me, and my 5 GB of free space got into my mind .

My plan was to move all my linux partitions behind the /dev/hda5 partition and then let my main Gentoo partition occupy the last sectors of my drive, but QtParted didn't even want to move my boot partition after the Documents partition. I would have liked it like this:

/dev/hda1 Windows XP (2 GB)
/dev/hda5 Documents, pictures, movies for Windows (10 GB)
------ No backup partition here
/dev/hda6 Gentoo boot partition (64 MB)
/dev/hda7 Swap partition (256 MB)
/dev/hda8 Gentoo itself (~10 GB)
------ No free space after my Gentoo partition

So my problem is: How can I make a partition bigger when the free space is before the partition? I tried the System Rescue CD, but QtParted didn't seem to be able to do this. Is this possible? Or can anybody show me an alternative way to make my 5 GB Gentoo partition occupy the space which was owned by my backup partition before?

[RR_]

Xmm. Tricky.

You can easily move your boot and swap partition manually by creating similar partitions on what was /dev/hda6(don ´t mind irrelevant number in hd*)
then you can copy your boot partition in the new one (during copy you must choose to keep permitions)

Then you must correctly configure grub/lilo and fstab so that computer boots.

Unfortunately i don´t know how you can merge the space left with ¨Gentoo itself¨.
I think I stumbled upon the solution on a post somewhere but I ´m not sure where.

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Still, you can just create a Linux partition on hda6 and mount it on a directory on your existing /dev/hda9

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Hope i helped.

[jdgill0]

Some ideas, as I have not come across how to resize a partition to left into free space myself.

Seems like you could move the contents of the partition as a whole to the left with the dd command, where perhaps you do something like this
a) get the block count of where hda6 starts/stops on /dev/hda.
b) delete /dev/hda6 ... the data I think remains in tact, only the partition is removed from the partition table.
c) create new /dev/hda5 with same size and type as old hda6 on the now larger amount of free space.
c) dd if=/dev/hda offset=start_block count=(end_block-start_block+1) of=/dev/hda5
d) now resize the new /dev/hda5 to the right.

I am definitely no expert, but could something like this work?
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