[CRASH] HD Partition & GRUB

[warpedcell]

Greetings Fedora community! I could really use your knowledge and experience on an issue. Due to the nature of this situation and my lack of knowledge in this area (Linux), I was unable to scope out any information on this.

I am currently using a 700G HD with Windows XP installed on it (NTFS). After becoming interested in the Fedora project, I created a Logical partition of 10G to use for Fedora. I set for the boot loader to boot to Fedora first.

Everything ran perfectly. Before I knew it, I was running low on disk space for the Fedora partition. I rebooted to windows and used Partition Magic 8 to perform the following 3 steps in order:

1) Split 100G off the primary partition to its own
2) Format the 100G partition with ext3
3) Merge the 100G partition with the original Fedora 10G partition

I rebooted, hit Enter to select to boot from Windows and the process began. One thing that Partition Magic does is it automatically begins its processes for formating and merging when WINDOWS boots up.

Now my issue! Now after the disk management, every time the PC boots, the GNU GRUB grub> command is displayed. I have no clue whatsoever how to navigate this or to use that to fix my possible partitioning issue. I went to the GNU GRUB website and filtered through the documentation but I can't find anything pertaining to the issue I'm having.

If any of you have ever come across this problem before or know what I can do, I would greatly appreciate your assistance. Thanks in advance!

[Dies]

Hmm...

For now, try typing this at the grub command line to see if you can get into Windows:

rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
boot

If that gets you into Windows please open disk management and post a screenshot so we can take a look at your drive, and it's probably a good time to DL a Live CD and maybe also

http://supergrub.forjamari.linex.org/

These things are nice to have around when you run into issues like these.

[warpedcell]

Thanks for the quick response, trying that now. Will edit this with response.

[warpedcell]

Dies, I love you. Worked like a charm. Would you be able to explain to me the logic in that syntax? I'd just like to be able to understand somewhat of what's going on at the system level.

Here is a screenshot of the disk management from windows:



And here is a screenshot of Partition Magic 8's current configuration:



I'm going to check and see if i can try to merge the unallocated back into the WinXP partition. If that works hopefully I'll be able to have Linux work. Could the unallocated space be whats conflicting with Fedora from starting normally?

[Dies]

Originally Posted by warpedcell

Dies, I love you. Worked like a charm. Would you be able to explain to me the logic in that syntax? I'd just like to be able to understand somewhat of what's going on at the system level.

Grub counts from zero, so you just told it to not verify anything and just pass the ball to whatever is in the first partition of the first hard disk.

Grub has quite a few commands, options, have a look when you get bored.

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html

Originally Posted by warpedcell

I'm going to check and see if i can try to merge the unallocated back into the WinXP partition. If that works hopefully I'll be able to have Linux work. Could the unallocated space be whats conflicting with Fedora from starting normally?

Not sure what caused the problem, but when you first installed Fedora did you manually partition and make one / partition of 10 gigs?

You can try restoring grub by booting from the Fedora installation disk and picking the rescue option or typing

linux rescue

follow along with the prompts, if everything is alright it will tell you that it has mounted your filesystem under /mnt/sysimage when you hit OK you will be at a command prompt, now you can try to restore grub by doing

chroot /mnt/sysimage
grub

that should put you in the grub shell, now see if it can find it's files with

find /boot/grub/stage1

if it gives you some output, for example it might say "root (hd0,2)" then do

root (hd0,2)
setup (hd0)
quit
quit
quit

if it doesn't give you any output, or a file not found then.....

just type quit to leave the grub shell then take a moment to grab the fdisk output

fdisk -l

and post it here, that's a small L by the way.

[warpedcell]

I just tried to merge the NTFS partition back into C:... Partition Magic gave the error:

#510 The version of the file system is not supported
An updated version of PartitionMagic is required to operate on this new version of the file system. Visit www.symantec.com for information about updated versions of PartitionMagic.

Which makes no sense... I'm trying to merge one NTFS file system into another. This is really frustrating. I'll give it a shot with the linux rescue... Have a partition manager for linux in there... maybe I can get the conversion into ext3 to work from there.

[warpedcell]

No go, I was unable to even get it to work with a LiveCD (locked up when choosing keyboard character set multiple times). I ended up having to delete my Linux partition in windows then re-creating a single partition with the combined unallocated space. Extremely frustrating!

What would be the easiest method of breaking off free space from the WinXP partition and allocating it to the linux ext3 partition? Any ideas?

[Dies]

http://partedmagic.com/wiki/PartedMagic.php

Grab that Live CD, burn it, then boot from it and delete everything ( that means everything ) but the Windows partition, now shrink the Windows partition by whatever amount you want then layout your Linux partitions, reboot and install.

[warpedcell]

Yea, that's the only way I was able to get it to work. Wish there was an easier way to manage multiple partition types with different platforms. Oh well, do what you can with what you have right?

What would be the easiest method to copy my current Linux platform files and configurations if I ever had to do this again? A way to "reinstall" the OS so I wouldn't have to go through everything again. Is that possible?

Thanks so much for your help, I really appreciate it.

[Dies]

Sure, check out

http://www.clonezilla.org/

If you have a spare drive laying around it's easy to do it using Gparted which is on the Parted Magic CD.

I do this with Windows, you just copy and paste the partition from one drive to another, doesn't get any easier. It has to be unallocated space though.


Funny, to me re-installing Windows is a major pain in the ***, and seems to take hours and many reboots, while re-installing Linux is so easy it only takes about an hour to be back up to speed, unless you have a really slow connection of course.