Problems getting Linux running after partition shuffle
 

A little while ago I had to reinstall SuSE 8.2 after royally screwing something up, so I ended up with two partitions on hdb.. hdb3, my old Linux system, and hdb4, my new one. I recovered as much data as I could from hdb3, then today I deleted it. However, when I deleted it the partitions got shuffled, so my 'new' Linux system is now hdb2, and now it won't start properly. I think I've got grub.conf and menu.lst modified appropriately, but whenever I try to do a 'grub-install /dev/hda', I get something about it not reading /boot/grub/stage1 correctly, which seems odd because the file is right where it should be. I've managed to get Windows running fine through the GRUB prompt (chainloader (hd0,0)+1), but when I try to run Linux via the prompt I get complaints from fsck, which is looking for hdb4 and, of course, failing to find a reiserfs filesystem there, so instead of loading KDE it dumps me into a prompt.

Help?

well by deleting that entry, you're partition setup is all wrong in grub.conf. that shift you talked about is what screwed it up. you need to fix grub.conf to translate this change to your linux partition. an easier way is to try recreate that partition you deleted except make it really small.

try recreating a partition where you deleted the old partition

Yeah, I changed all the references in grub.conf, but it still doesn't work. Does grub need to be reinstalled for the changes to take effect?

So I'm assuming I would make the small partition to fix the fsck issues. I can try that, though I'd prefer a solution wherein I don't have to create more partitions, of course.

Ah, I fixed it. The key was editing /etc/fstab so it matched up with my current config... after that, I managed to boot Linux normally, then I did a grub-install (which worked this time) to write the changes I made to grub.conf and menu.lst to the MBR.

Crisis averted. Stand down from red alert.