I've seen posts in the past that advise against changing the partition number but like Fox Mulder:  All the evidence to the contrary is not entirely dissuasive I have an old MBR disk that I used to boot from before I install Ubuntu on a faster M.2 ssd.I now want to remove my old Win8 partitions and give the space back to Linuxfdisk /dev/sdaDisk /dev/sda: 1.8 TiB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectorsUnits: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytesSector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytesI/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytesDisklabel type: dosDisk identifier: 0x3457a860Device     Boot     Start        End    Sectors  Size Id Type/dev/sda1  *         2048  524290047  524288000  250G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT/dev/sda2       524290048  548290559   24000512 11.5G 82 Linux swap / Solaris/dev/sda3       548292606  648290303   99997698 47.7G  5 Extended/dev/sda4       648290304 3907028991 3258738688  1.5T 83 Linux/dev/sda5       548292608  648290303   99997696 47.7G 83 LinuxThe only partition that I use is sda4.sda1 was my old Win8 dual boot partitionsda2 was for swap but now I'm running on a separate ssdsda5 was for /boot before my current ssdIs is possible to delete sda1, sda2 and sda5 and perform something like e2fsresize to grow my ext4 filesystem into the extra space and then rename sda4 to sda1?I rather not resort to buying a new 2TB drive just so I can backup my files and repartition the whole disk.
How to renumber partitions
partition;fdisk