On Mon, Sep 10, 2007 at 09:50:49AM -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: > 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...
Thank you very much for the very detailed response. I have spent the last couple of days trying to fix this, but still I can't. The first problem, creating a bootable partition at the beginning of the disk, is already solved. GParted is actually an amazing tool. Anyway, I had a Debian Etch Live CD, and the GParted version on it didn't work (can't move the beginning of a partition). So I had to download a gparted Live CD (0.3.4-8), and it did the job (took a couple of hours, though). I then did all the other steps. I edited fstab, menu.lst, and ran update-initramfs. Initially, the /boot partition was named /dev/hdd3, but running fdisk I could change the order, and now it's /dev/hdd1 (/boot, 500 Mb), /dev/hdd2 (/, 160G), and /dev/hdd3 (swap). However, when I boot, I get to the grub stage 1.5 line, then "Error 15" (no further explanaition), and nothing, not even the grub prompt. I understand Error 15 means some file not found, but don't know what to do. Currently, my /etc/fstab is: /dev/hdd2 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1 /dev/hdd1 /boot ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 2 /dev/hdd3 none swap sw 0 0 proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 /dev/hda /media/cdrom udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0 /dev/fda /media/floppy auto rw,user,noauto 0 0 All menu.lst entries are of the form: root (hd1,1) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-<version> root=/dev/hdd2 ro initrd /boot/initrd.img-<version> And device.map is, as before: (hd0) /dev/hdc (hd1) /dev/hdd And I have two bootable partitions, /dev/hdc (Windows), and /dev/hdd1 (/boot partition). I've tried several things: boot from Debian Live CD/Etch Disk 1/Gparted Live CD, then change the order of entries in /etc/fstab, changing the pass-number parameter in /etc/fstab (hdd1 and hdd2 had pass number 1, and I changed it to be 2 and 1, respectively, have run update-initramfs again, but nothing. I understand that, now that partitions are in order, /dev/hdd2, which is the root filesystem according to fstab, will be (hd1,1) for grub, and that kernels should be found in (hd1,1)/boot/, thus the "kernel" line in menu.lst should be /boot/vmlinuz, if root="(hd1,1)". Right? Until now, the only strange thing is that 'update-initramfs -k "all" -u' yields some "grep: /proc/modules No such file or directory" errors for each kernel, but don't know if that's relevant. Sorry to keep bothering with this, but it's still not solved, I've googled a lot, and can't find something that works. Victor -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
