Re: Resizing moving & deleting partitions

[Chris Jones]

On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 06:52:40PM EDT, Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko 
wrote:
> On 17.10.2011 00:40, Chris Jones wrote:

> > Lately, I had to increase the size of the partition where grub-pc is
> > managed. Upon rebooting, the grub menu had become inaccessible, all
> > I could see was an "Error: file not found". As far as I can
> > remember, there was also a shell-like prompt with "rescue" or "grub
> > rescue" followed by the greater than ">" sign but I wasn't able to
> > make much of that.
> >

> Unless the UUID was changed (in which case the partitioning tool is to
> blame), number of /boot was changed, embed area was affected or it was
> a blocklist install to begin with (in which case you've been warned)
> it shouldn't happen. If you can provide a way to recreate it on
> loopback (in preference a script), please file a bug report. Using
> UUIDs to locate /boot is currently done only on cross-disk installs as
> it eats valuable embedding space.

Apologies, I should've made it clear I wasn't reporting a bug, just
giving a general idea of the ‘context’.

This type of question should probably been asked on a grub user list,
anyway.

> > Backing up everything and reinstalling on top of LVM would probably
> > make it easier to move stuff around, but since grub.cfg config files
> > appear to point to bootable partitions via their ordinal numbers
> > - i.e. msdos3, msdos7, etc. - I doubt this would make much
> > difference (?).

> Read better. grub.cfg uses UUIDs, partition ids are only a fallback.

ibid.

[..]

Something that I could have put to excellent use is the internal SD
adapter on this laptop, so that I wouldn't have a silly USB key sticking
out like a sore thumb (more like an accident waiting to happen), but it
doesn't seem my BIOS allows booting off of whatever's in it.

If it did, I could then have my boot loader ‘on a chip’ so-to-speak.

I would always know where my boot loader lives, where it is managed, and
never have to worry about having a live CD handy to address situations
that require one - partition maintenance, reinstalling/repairing the
boot loader.. but also cold back ups, restores, replacing a hard drive,
etc. 

All the same, thanks for your comments.

CJ