This is not a grub question per se but I'm not sure where else I could find _reliable_ information about this.¹
I am in the process of spring-cleaning my laptop's hard drives and would like to delete a couple of partitions. Here is the (partial) output of fdisk -l: | Disk /dev/sdb: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes | 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders | | [..] | | Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes | 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders | Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes | Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes | I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes | Disk identifier: 0x8f49dca2 | | Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System | /dev/sda1 * 1 223 1782784 7 HPFS/NTFS | Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary. | /dev/sda2 223 7435 57936884 7 HPFS/NTFS | /dev/sda3 35854 38914 24576344 7 HPFS/NTFS | /dev/sda4 7435 33385 208437249 5 Extended | /dev/sda5 21713 24145 19530752 83 Linux | /dev/sda6 24145 26090 15624192 82 Linux swap / Solaris | /dev/sda7 26090 28522 19529728 83 Linux | /dev/sda8 28522 33385 39061504 83 Linux | /dev/sda9 7435 11934 36132864 83 Linux | | Partition table entries are not in disk order The partitions that I want to delete are /dev/sda5 and /dev/sda8. My /boot/grub directory is in the /dev/sda9 partition and if I boot off of a live CD and delete the /dev/sda5 and /dev/sda8 partitions, the current /dev/sda6, /dev/sda8 and /dev/sda9 will automatically be renumbered and become /dev/sda5, /dev/sda6, and /dev/sda7 (msdos5, msdos6, and msdos7). As a result, if I proceed to reboot off of the hard drive, the grub boot loader environement will fail to initialize because it will look for the /boot/grub/ directory in the /dev/sda9 (msdos9) partition, which no longer exists.² Rather than go through the hassle of repairing a broken boot loader manually from the grub rescue prompt (or worse do a grub-install --root-directory= of a possibly incompatible version of grub from a repair CD), is there a better strategy³..? Would chroot'ing to the linux system on /dev/sda9 (now /dev/sda7) immediately after deleting the two partitions and running update-grub (and OS-prober) from the chroot be the best choice..? Is there another, perhaps more elegant, solution..? Thanks, CJ ¹ Obviously, a detailed/reliable manual, wiki, howto.. that describes such scenarios would be fine, but I haven't been able to find one. ² /etc/fstab's should be OK since I use UUID='s everywhere. ³ Simple use case, the only complication being that there are two hard drives in this laptop - but no encryption, no lvm, no raid.. etc. _______________________________________________ Help-grub mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-grub
