OK, so it may not be the most common thing you would do, but I had left an area of my hard disk empty and without partitioned so that when I had settled in, I could use it for whatever would benefit most from the space.
Now, the setup of my main boot disk was as follows:
- Partition 1 – Windows Vista C:
- Above mentioned empty space
- Partition 2 – Ubuntu Studio
- Extended Partition:
Linux Swap Partition
Gaming Partition G:
So, I then without a care in the world quickly added a B: for documents in the space mentioned… moved all my locations and files there… and shut down.
The fun started the next day… Of course, as I am multi-booting, I use a Linux boot manager… they just can’t be beaten… GRUB being the system of choice for Ubuntu.
Now, only when the Grub menu puts out nothing but an error did I realise what I had just done… (the error didn’t really help.. it was just then that I worked it out;) Linux including the Grub files, according the the hard disc, are now not on partition 2… but partition 3.
Phew.. glad I knew that… now, how to fix it.
I’ll skip the things I tried with my USB live dists and the like and go straight to the solution I think:
- Pop in your installation disk and boot to it (if you don’t have it any more.. download a new one… it’s Linux for goodness sake 🙂
- Choose the recovery option and then open a console on the partition of your linux installation (you should know this, having just edited the partition)
- If use an older version of grub you will first need to edit your menu.lst file to point to the correct partitions.
- Finally, just reinstall Grub. In the following example, my linux root is sda3 and sda is the boot disk:
sudo grub > root (hd0,2)
> setup (hd0)
> quit - Now just reboot and breath a sigh of relief 🙂