Arch Linux

Gryaniy

Member

From: USA,UKRAINE,MEXICO

Registered: 2013-02-15

Posts: 46

[SOLVED]move /boot on HYBRID HARD DRIVE.

Good morning Archers

I have one of those samsung HYbrid hard drives that has an 8 GB SSD  integrated for the "windoze smart cache" BS technology. 

I installed arch and I screwed up installing grub2 and boot on the non-ssd part (Sda) and want to move the /boot partition to the SSD part (sdb).

Partition schema

HD - SATA 1T   with GRUB2 here. Sda
/boot      sda1
/home
/var

SSD scsi drive is 8 GB - sdb
/                  sdb1

I read somewhere that the SCSI drive is not stable for grub2 and not recommended to host grub.

Would it be enough to create a new /boot partition as sdb2 in the last 150mb of this disk?
then cloning sda1 and changing fstab and grub.conf? or do I need to reinstall grub?

Thanks,
Gryazniy

Last edited by Gryaniy (2014-06-22 02:11:52)

Gryaniy

Member

From: USA,UKRAINE,MEXICO

Registered: 2013-02-15

Posts: 46

Re: [SOLVED]move /boot on HYBRID HARD DRIVE.

Anybody? :-(

parchd

Member

Registered: 2014-03-08

Posts: 421

Re: [SOLVED]move /boot on HYBRID HARD DRIVE.

I've got no idea, but I'd just reinstall grub and hope for the best. The worst that can happen is you have to reinstall grub again from a livecd when it doesn't work, right?

dodo3773

Member

Registered: 2011-03-17

Posts: 818

Re: [SOLVED]move /boot on HYBRID HARD DRIVE.

Go in with a live cd and create a boot directory in / and then rsync all the files from your current boot directory to it. After that just comment out the boot line in your fstab so it just looks for everything in /. After that update grub and you should be good to go (this probably isn't even necessary since grub points to / as a starting point anyways). No reason to create a new partition I don't think.

Gryaniy

Member

From: USA,UKRAINE,MEXICO

Registered: 2013-02-15

Posts: 46

Re: [SOLVED]move /boot on HYBRID HARD DRIVE.

so, tried what Dodo3773 sugested and it boots just fine, but for some reason it utilizes  grub and boot from the first HD  "sda"....

Re-installed grub as well... I still boot... but its booting from the old grub on sda.. there's no way in the BIOS to tell it to boot from  sdb ... the BIOS sees the disk as one..

dodo3773

Member

Registered: 2011-03-17

Posts: 818

Re: [SOLVED]move /boot on HYBRID HARD DRIVE.

If the bios won't let you boot from sdb then you need to keep the actual grub mbr install on sda anyways I'm pretty sure.

Gryaniy

Member

From: USA,UKRAINE,MEXICO

Registered: 2013-02-15

Posts: 46

Re: [SOLVED]move /boot on HYBRID HARD DRIVE.

Alright,  after playing a while with both grub and syslinux I realized that is impossible to boot straight from the SSD part....   even if the "SSD disk"(sdb) has a bootable-active  partition,  it won't be seen by GRUB/SYSLINUX on boot,  they still look for it on the main HD(sda)  regardless of fstab and grub/syslinux.cfg.

These  Hybrid HDs need the boot partition on the non-ssd part (Sda).

THe workaround was to create a separate boot partition/boot loader in sdb and  chainload it from sda..

Thank you for your input

Last edited by Gryaniy (2014-06-22 02:12:13)