On Mon, Sep 10, 2007 at 02:18:18AM -0400, Victor Munoz wrote: > On Sun, Sep 09, 2007 at 02:12:19PM -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: > > > > yup. probably up until now you've always had this problem, but the > > kernels happened to be written within the first 1024 cylinders and > > thus caused no problem. Also, the same with menu.lst, it was probably > > within that boundary as well. Then last week, the menu.lst got > > rewritten to a part of the disk that the bios can't see and suddenly > > doesn't work. > > > > At least that's the way I understand it. Reality may diverge > > drastically from my perception. ;) > > > > Sounds very logical, so it must be true :-) Anyway, is there anyway to > make a nondestructive repartition? I'm aware gparted can resize > partitions, for instance, but in this case I need to split one big > partition into two, and I'm afraid I can't do it in a safe way, right? I'm not positive that gparted will move the beginning of a partition, but its certainly worth a shot. This is what I'd do: 1. Backup everything. 2. Review 1 several times. 3. launch a live-cd (knoppix or somesuch) 4. use a partition editor (gparted, qtparted, whatever) to rezise the existing / partition by moving the start of it up 500MB or so. 5. create a new bootable partition at the front of the device. 6. create a fs on the new partition 7. mount the new and old partitions. 8. copy over all of /mnt/old-part/boot to /mnt/new-part 9. edit up /mnt/old-part/etc/fstab 10. umount /mnt/new-part and remount it on /mnt/old-part/boot 11. chroot into /mnt/old-part 12. update-grub or manually edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to reflect new root partitions in kernel=lines 13. maybe have to run update-initrdfs to fix-up the initrd for new root partition. 14. reboot... this is entirely untested. ymmv wildly. I am not liable! though, FWIW, I have done *similar* things in the past, but never before split /boot from / in such a way that / moves to a relatively different partition. the most important part is 1. If you blow that one, you can't recover. All the others can be recovered from because of 1 :) A
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