Partitioning disks without losing data.
I have instaled Debian Pototo on an old Pentium 133MHz PCI machine to
use primarily as a firewall/gateway for our internet. It has two 2GB
drives. hda has a 32MB swap partition and the rest of the disk is the
root partition. I use all of hdb as the /home mount. Both hard drives
are configured in the bios for LBA mode (other choices available are
AUTO, LARGE and NORMAL).
It *was* booting OK but now it doesn't. LILO comes up and the kernel
starts to boot. It then gets a kernel panic saying "attempt to access
beyond end of device". I know that hdb has been having some problems
with timeouts. I'm not sure if it is the harddrive or the harddisk
controller. If I boot from floppy and type "rescue root=/dev/hda2" then
the machine boots OK. This leads me to believe that the kernel and/or
modules need to be in a small boot partition at the start of the disk.
Is this a correct assumption or is something else likely to be the
problem ? I think I have upgraded the kernel (was 2.2.15 from the
floppies) to 2.2.17.
If I do need to create a boot partition, then I need to move and resive
some/all of the partitions on hda. Can I do this without losing all the
information on the root partition. It takes soooo long to install all
this over the internet. Maybe I should burn a CD image ? Will
something like fips do what I want ? Are there any other tools ??
Please CC any replies to me as well as the list,
Thanks,
Brendan Simon.
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