[SOLVED] Merge Primary Partition into Extended Partition

[caljohnsmith]

Did the Grub commands you ran say they completed successfully? Also, I made your sda3 extended partition start 63 sectors before the new sda5 linux partition, which is normally where the extended partition starts if the sda5 partition is on a cylinder boundary; it looks like your original sda3 linux partition was slightly off, so that's why sfdisk gives that warning. As far as I know you shouldn't have to be concerned about it though, because all modern OSes uses LBA (Logical Block Addressing) rather than CHS (Cylinders, Heads, Sectors), so it is not necessary for a partition to start/stop exactly on a cylinder boundary. Also, I've found that it depends on which partitioning program you use as to what geometry (CHS) is originally used to create the partition table, and if you use a different partitioning program that uses a different geometry after that, you can get those types of geometry warnings like you did anyway.

Since both your fstab and menu.lst use UUIDs, it looks like you should be all set and able to boot again (assuming the Grub commands ran successfully). I notice you are missing a swap partition or swap file, so you might want to make one at some point. One small thing to correct would be the reference to "sda3" in your fstab, and also your missing swap partition, so how about doing:

sudo mount /dev/sda5 /mnt
gksudo gedit /mnt/etc/fstab

Don't worry if the first mount command returns an error, that means you probably still have sda5 mounted on /mnt. Once you open fstab, change sda3 to sda5, and comment out the swap partition line:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
# /dev/sda5
UUID=79dec3e4-ad3d-4607-bb63-92b6cbc8ae12 /               ext3    relatime,errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /dev/sda4
#UUID=f11fbbee-816b-4882-85bd-733c646ed612 none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/scd0       /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0       0

Then reboot, and let me know what happens or if you have any problems. We can work from there.

[opticyclic]

Quality!
Thanks for that.

I just have to resize a bit now using GParted and everything will be perfect

[caljohnsmith]

Quality!
Thanks for that.

I just have to resize a bit now using GParted and everything will be perfect

So did you confirm you can boot Ubuntu OK? If so, cheers and have fun trying new distros.