Arch Linux

Hy Ginsberg

Member

From: Massachusetts

Registered: 2008-08-22

Posts: 74

Website

[Solved] GRUB trouble moving /boot to new partition

Hi All,

I am trying to move /boot to its own partition (so I can convert the rest of / to ext4 without worrying about boot problems).  I copied the contents of /boot to the new partition and edited /etc/fstab to mount it as /boot.  Now I need to tell GRUB to find /boot on /dev/sda1 (the new location) instead of /dev/sda8 (the old location).  When I run GRUB and type

 root (hd0,0) 

I get:

Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x27 

If I try:

setup (hd0,0)

I get:

Error 12: Invalid device requested

I also tried running "grub-install /dev/sda1"; it reports "The file boot/grub/stage1 not read correctly."

For what it's worth the partition used to be NTFS, and I changed it to ext3 with gparted.  I then ran

 fsck.ext3 -pf /dev/sda1 

which worked fine.   

Thanks for any suggestions.

- Hy

Last edited by Hy Ginsberg (2011-06-17 22:45:41)

Inxsible

Forum Fellow

From: Chicago

Registered: 2008-06-09

Posts: 9,183

Re: [Solved] GRUB trouble moving /boot to new partition

I am trying to move /boot to its own partition (so I can convert the rest of / to ext4 without worrying about boot problems).

Why ?

grub and grub2 both support booting from EXT4. The grub available in the Arch repos is patched to enable booting from EXT4

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Hy Ginsberg

Member

From: Massachusetts

Registered: 2008-08-22

Posts: 74

Website

Re: [Solved] GRUB trouble moving /boot to new partition

Because the Arch wiki says:

Warning: Booting from an ext4 partition is not 'officially' supported by GRUB, and GRUB2 is still under development. While GRUB does currently work, the 'safe' option is to boot from an ext2 or ext3 /boot partition. CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED!

Are you saying that's outdated advice and should be ignored?

Inxsible

Forum Fellow

From: Chicago

Registered: 2008-06-09

Posts: 9,183

Re: [Solved] GRUB trouble moving /boot to new partition

yes, because grub upstream officially doesn't support booting from ext4. but the good devs here at Arch have added the patch in.

I do not have a separate boot and my / partition is ext4

---

Forum Rules

There's no such thing as a stupid question, but there sure are a lot of inquisitive idiots !

Hy Ginsberg

Member

From: Massachusetts

Registered: 2008-08-22

Posts: 74

Website

Re: [Solved] GRUB trouble moving /boot to new partition

Okay, great -- thanks very much for the help.  And probably I will just let it go.  But on the other hand I have this small partition set up, ready to go; it's vexing that I can't manage to get GRUB to recognize it.  Any ideas on what's going on there and how to remedy it?

Hy Ginsberg

Member

From: Massachusetts

Registered: 2008-08-22

Posts: 74

Website

Re: [Solved] GRUB trouble moving /boot to new partition

Putting this one to bed, but for posterity:

1) My system failed miserably to boot from ext4, and I ended up having to reinstall from scratch.  Not saying that Arch can't do it, but just that in my case it was an abyssmal failure.  The details are at: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=120932

2) I think the crux of my problem getting GRUB to accept my new partition was a matter of alignment of partition boundaries.  When I tried to create a new system from scratch, after giving up on resurrecting my dead system, the installation failed at the "install bootloader" step.  Using gparted I started all over (with a new partition table) and chose to align my partitions to cylinder boundaries (which is not the default), and that made everything go nice and smoothly.