Re-partitioning to separate /boot
 

Morning all,

I hust realized that I did not separate /boot from / when I installed RHEL3 on one of my machines. Is there a way re-partition to separate /boot, or should I leave as is? The machine is dual boot, and I had a trial geting it running, so I don't want to re-install if I can avoid.

Thanks,

Robin.

because of the importance of /boot, id recommend not touching it, but it should have installed on a seperate partition at install time, unless you did something wierd

check your partition table and make sure its really in the / partition

run mount and look for /boot, if its in mount, its already in a seperate partition

--adam

try this. assuming you have room on the hard disk to make a new partition, make one large enough to hold /boot. It doesn't have to be much larger than the current /boot directory, unless you plan to add more kernels.

Then, copy /boot to the new partition, and rename the current /boot directory in /. if anything goes wrong, you can fix it by booting from install cd and name it back. you will also have to edit /etc/fstab and grub.conf to remove the /boot partition from fstab, and re-define the location of /boot in grub.conf.

edit /etc/fstab to add the new partition with mount point.

edit grub.conf to change the location of /boot/vmlinuz (or whatever it's called on your distro):
kernel (hd0,5)/vmlinuz (assuming hd0,5 is the new /boot partition.

if the above procedure works to your satisfaction, you can then delete /boot directory under /.

I decided to re-install Windows and then RHEL3, the use disk druid to partition the /boot separately, and it all worked out great. Funny thing is, after all the time doing this, the server has been running the linux partition ever since!