Brown Trouser Time!

Saturday, March 18, 2006 11:35 pm By BigLig

So, I switch it to hda5, boot, and still can't mount hda7 – it reports this is swap.

Oh dear, I think. Or words to that effect.

So, reboot to Windows, and thank goodness, it can see Data2, and so I copy files to Data1 (just room for them) and blow data2 away – it can be my new /home if I can figure out how to do this.
Reboot, and grub error 17. It's this sort of thing that causes unrest.
I remain calm, barely, and boot from a knoppix CD – or rather I would, if I could find it. Failing that, I boot from an ancient linux live CD I can find.
Right, off to read up on grub. Manual is unintelligible; this page slightly less so.
My notes go bad at this point, sorry. I think it was fear.
Anyhow, from grub on the boot CD I use the find command to work out that Linux is on (hd0,2) in GRUB-speak, which is hda3 in fstab speak.
setup (hd0) gets grub in the MBR reset so that on booting I get a grub menu. Huzzah, I can boot to Windows from this, but not to Linux.
I can study the entry in the boot menu from this and see that the partitions are wrong – it's looking at (hd0,3). Has Windows reordered the partitons? How odd, since I deleted the last one... shouldn't have thought it would touch any earlier ones.
Hit the buttons to edit the menu item and decrease all the numbers by one and it boots into Linux. So edit the menu.lst in /boot/grub to make this permanent, cross my fingers, and reboot.

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