A fine mess... Partition help.

[ranch hand]

Nah, screw it up. Best way to learn.

If you can get an external drive it is nice to have an install that can't hurt you that you can play with. This will work with an external as long as you can turn off the internal drive.

Right now I am on my test platform (spend most of my time here) running 10.04. My internal drives are "off" so that there is no way I can screw up my "real" installs.

I learned about multi booting the first week I had Hardy (first linux) installed bucause I have an unreasonable wife.

I broke Hardy past my ablity to fix it 5 time s the first week playing with it. It was so FUN. The wife was not amused. She thinks the computer should work.

I installed a second Hardy just to experiment on. Did nothing to the "main" until it past the second install and that included updates.

Still have that first Hardy on here too. Works great.

[egalvan]

I think this is why folks use things like clonezilla to move from drive to drive.

Generally, clonezilla is a little easier to use.

since partitions should be un-mounted in order to cleanly clone them,
then booting with a gparted cd or clonezilla cd is more or less the same. Clonezilla just provides a few more options, such as cloning entire drives at once, and using the LAN.

I think that re writes the fstab.

No, clonezilla does NOT touch the fstab.

I don't use it as;
A>I like to know what an app is doing so I need to learn to do it myself first

Knowing what is going on is an excellent way of keeping your OS and data safer.
Although I'm a bit confused as to what "doing it myself first" means...
Does this mean you have used "dd" to move the bits, and then did a direct fix to the partition table to reflect the changes?
(I greatly admire your software skills, and have no doubts that you could do this...seriously)

B>I do not like the idea of someone elses script messing with my files

So you have changed all the scripts in Ubuntu to ones you wrote yourself?
Again, I'm confused as to the meaning of this...

C>Third party apps to run your box is just too damned much like "running" MS

Even more confusing...

Ubuntu, and indeed 100% of Linux/Unix is composed of "third-party apps".
Or are you saying that Cannonical wrote ALL of Ubuntu?


Clonezila is not a program...
Clonezilla could be termed a "distro"...
It is Open Source GPL, and it uses Open Source GPL apps to do it's work.
See the project pages.

gparted is an Open Source GPL GUI "frontend" that uses the Open Source GPL project known as "parted" to do it's work.
See the project pages.

By contrast, most everything Microsoft uses is closed-source, proprietary, copy-righted, patented DRM'ed and "Intellectual Property" protected.

As I said, I'm confused as to where your concerns about clonezilla and others is coming from.
But I only have your written words, so I may have misunderstood something, somewhere.

I switched to Linux so I could actually run my box. Got a lot to learn but it is FUN.

Yep, it's mighty fun.
And I think that as long as it is Open Source, GPL, it's OK by me.
I don't even mind donating some $$ to the authors,
which I encourage everyone to do,
and I do it on a regular basis.

And to close this....

It's YOUR CHOICE as to how and what you run on your machine

which is the greatest strength in the OSS/FOSS/GNU/GPL Community.

[Nesaskewatch]

That's a bummer. There are a couple of items in your boot info that seemed odd to me. First is that sda1 appears to have grub installed in that partition. I don't think that should be there but I'm not knowledgeable enough about grub to speak in absolutes.

This turned out to be the clue that eventually made everything clear. When I first upgraded sda5 from 9.10 to 10.04, I was given a choice of where to install the new grub. (10.04 has a new version) When I moused over the check boxes to select where to put grub, a pop up information box opened that says to install grub to all on the list if you are unsure where to put it. I was very unsure! I selected all. That was when this whole mess started. Had I fully understood what was happening, I would have never installed grub to the windows partition. All the resizing and moving went perfectly fine as it turns out. It was the updater installing grub to windows (at my direction due to a lack of understanding) that messed things up. I would merely have had to update-grub had I not installed grub all over the place! Another mistake I made was not checking if all the os's were functioning before moving on. I might have caught the problem much sooner had I made sure everything was ok.

I am going to post much the same thing in the Lucid development forum as well. I have not seen much warning about this issue (if it is indeed an issue) Might be a good idea to make it clear not to ever install grub to a windows partition; that is unless you really want to for some reason! Believe it or not, I had no idea that I shouldn't...

Again, thanks for all the help.

[Nesaskewatch]

Just one last thing. This (link) is a good place to go if you need to fix a windows boot sector or mbr. In my case it was simply a matter of booting into the xp disk and running fixboot.exe from the recovery console. There are other less intrusive methods at that link as well. Useful for us chronic windows users.

Excelsior!