[LBo] Partition Party (was Permanent /home partition)

[Anita Lewis]

On 06/06/2006 10:52 PM Jisao wrote:

> I have made an experiment of removing a fat32 partition on my hard 
> drive and put an ext2 instead.  Stefan had suggested I tried that to 
> share large files between windows and linux.

Did you actually *remove* the fat32 partition and make an ext2 instead, 
or you did you change the *type* of the existing fat32 partition?  If 
you removed it and made a new partition, it is possible that the 
numbering of the partitions was changed.  This would be especially true 
if the fat32 was a logical partition.

> Reput the drive in my computer and fixed the MBR. So at least now I 
> can access win.  I still have to figure out if I want to install grub 
> without reinstalling a full distro (and how), or if I want to wipe all 
> Linux partitions, change the layout and reinstall Kanotix and Ubuntu 
> (I forego Suse.  Can't get used to it after years of  Debian cousins).
>
> Finally, I will have to figure out what really happened when Suse 
> wrote the new partition table and what is the "theory" behind reading 
> all these partitions from different systems.  That should keep me busy 
> while commuting to work. That way, I will not repeat such a successful 
> partition mish mash.
>

If the numbering of the partitions changed, then you can fix it by 
editing /etc/fstab in each distro and editing the grub menu.lst that you 
use to install grub.  It might be wise to edit those on each distro, 
just in case you decide to install grub or update from a different 
distro some time. You should run 'grub-install /dev/hda' or whatever 
your drive is as well.  Probably grub was pointing to the wrong 
partition after you did the remove and create of the partition. If, for 
example, the menu.lst for grub had been on /dev/hda7, it might have 
moved to /dev/hda6. 

I've done this before, although it was back in the days when I used LILO. 

Anita