After removal of the first primary partition, you might notice, that the names of the remaining partitions didn’t change. /dev/sda2 stays /dev/sda2. To renumber the partition, use fdisk and create a new primary partition no. 1 which is located behind sda2. You might want to delete your swap partition, create a new one in partition slot no. 1.

Now enter the expert menu of fdisk and type f to fix the partition table. The partitions will be renumbered according to their position on disk. After that delete the temporary partition and re-create your swap. Don’t forget to write the new partition table to disk.

Afterwards, update your /boot/grub/menu.lst, maybe /etc/fstab and do a grub-install.