• Phew - I Almost Lost It All But SXDE Saved Me
Phew! I almost rendered my laptop useless. But SXDE saved the day.
When I first set up the partitions on my laptop, I allocated 15GB for Windows C:\ and 15GB for Windows D:\ and the rest (90GB) for Solaris. Well, it soon became clear that 15GB was not enough for the C:\ partition. I'd been meaning to combine C and D for some time now. Lately everything I ran on Windows got those Low On Disk Space messages. So my project for the weekend was to merge the two into a larger C:.
So, I booted up with my Knoppix live CD and used QTParted to repartition the C: partition to gobble up all of D:. That part seemed to work well. I recalled the last time I used QTParted it didn't mess with the data. And all looked fine, with the C:\ drive now 30GB with 14.5GB used.
That is, until I rebooted and discovered that QTParted had munged the Grub boot record. Now there was no way to boot Windows or SXDE. Grub just stared back at me not knowing what to do.
With knees shaking and a headache looming, I took a wild guess and figured that if I did another upgrade of SXDE, maybe the installer would recreate the Grub boot menu, restoring the pointers to the Solaris and Windows boot records. Well, it was worth a try. Anything else sounded horrible.
And it worked. I went thru the entire upgrade process again (oddly, the installer didn't ask why I was upgrading when the system appeared to be already up to date), and an hour or so later rebooted and there was the Grub menu looking as it should. Rebooting into Windows I found the C:\ drive with 30GB of space, 14.5 GB in use. It was all there, and it all worked.
Tragedy avoided. Time for a beer.
( Feb 09 2008, 06:05:31 PM PST )
[Solaris]
Permalink
Hi,
I am told that Linux's version of GRUB does not support UFS or ZFS so this could be the problem as one of these types existed on the disk when you use it.
Maybe Sun should sync there version upstream with GRUB to avoid this problem in future.
Regards,
Edward.
Posted by EdwardOCallaghan on February 10, 2008 at 10:05 AM PST #
Well, QTparted correctly identified the two Windows partitions, and recognized the Solaris partition as an unknown type. The first two partitions were the W/XP ones, and the last (higher) was Solaris.
Why QTParted touched the Grub menu I'm not sure. All I did was increase the size of the W/XP C:/ partition to include the D:/ partition after first "deleting" the D:/ (I don't see this as an SXDE problem but a QTParted one. Maybe it needs a "What should I do with the Grub boot menu?" action.)
I was quite surprised to find my Grub menu munged with no bootable partitions found when I rebooted back to the hard drive.
Maybe there is a grub command that will cause it to rescan the disk looking for bootable partitions and re-create the boot menu, but not knowing exactly how Grub works, and in the heat of the moment, I relied on the SXDE to recreate the boot menu, which, to my utter amazement, it did.
Posted by rchrd on February 10, 2008 at 09:58 PM PST #