Developers' Blogs: Pete

Just came to the point to rewamp my home pc. This means - backing up 100G data to an external hdd (no warez, mmedia like SFD2005 video recordings and audio track, a disk image of a 3.5 UHU linux partition etc.), formatting the main drive and give 0.4pre2 a go!

The main reason was for this reinstall to give more space to 3 linuxes, make room in the first primary partition for my educational copy of WinXP (not installed yet, but coming soon) and consequentally, shrink the last large /home partition.

It was a much straight process than pre1, and gone wonderfully till booting up console with all the stuff that can be installed from CD1. Err, it tried to boot, but upon restart i was given a cli grub shell - indicating sth. very nasty. Manually booting the system produced the error message about grub can reach the hdd sectors where the kernel is.

So the disk was sliced up, /hda1 is empty with 5G space, /hda5 was filled back from the previously dd-ed disk image with FS resize2fs'd, /hda6 holded 0.4pre2 (have to go with logical/extended partitions because you can have only 4 primary partitions which are obviously not fit for 4 system and a home part.).

The situation where you can't step back. The solution -at least in theory - to place the whole winxp (who knows how it boots or what quirks can arise) partition under the 4G bios barrier with leaving space to form separate /boot partitions for the 3 distros.

Well, i felt a bit lost facing this and kissed goodbye for my data but went forward: resized the uhu partition to a bit larger than the space used by files, dd-ed a bit more than the how long the fs was told, deleted it and the XP partition, created a 3,5G partition for the windows, and created two partitions for /boot 's (yes, two - one for the UHU distribution, and one for the two frugalwares, one FW for the latest stable from 0.4 on, and a forever -current for testing, they will share a common /boot), and the rest of space was given to the UHU (dd stuff back, e2fsck, resize2fs).

Because none of the OS-es installed with separate /boot in my mind, i had to boot to knoppix, mount the drives, get the contents of /boot from the root FS and copy it to the newly made partition - and modify grub entries and fstab entries to reflect the move. Did you know you can get 4 warnings for not placing \n at the end of the fstab while booting 0.4pre2 ?

After all, i have all my data (knock-knock) and both distro boots.