Messed up partitioning - CAN'T BOOT
 

I have a dual boot set-up with Win XP and Mandriva 2006. I wanted to increase my Linux partition to be able to upgrade to Mandriva 2007 (during intitial attempt of upgrading, the message came up that the system did not have enough space). So I allocated more hard drive space by decreasing my Winwods partition and then assigned free space to the Linux partition. Well, that renamed existing Linuxs partitions and probably did something else which I cannot understand at this point. The result, I cannot boot into Linux anymore. Any ideas if I can restore the previous partitions? Any help is much appreciated.

1) How was your hard drive partitioned before you changed it? Please list the partition types, the filesystem of each and their sizes (oh, and mount point if it exists).

2) How did you "assign" the free space to the linux parition? And which partition did you assing it to?

I am away from my PC right now so I'll try to answer your questions from my memory until I get home later on today and take a look at it again.

I had:

1) Windows partition
2) hda3 ext partition containing root (mounted /)
3) swap partition /s
4) hda4 ext partition (mounted /home)

After I 'freed up' more space, I created another partition. This renamed with became hda5, and the rest Linux partitions were renamed hda6, hda7, hda8 accordingly. This is what I vaguely remember at this point.

One more thing, I tried to run upgrade on Mandriva 2006 (which is currently installed), and when I reach Partitioning I can see existing partitions. Is there any way I could do anything there to reassign/repair things? Thanks!


P.S. I realize now that partitioning in Linux is extremely "tricky" if you don't know what you are doing. Stupid of me to mess around with it without much clue.

I forgot to answer the second question.

I freed up hard disc space under Windows. Then I went into Mandriva System Confguration utility, picked the unassigned space and made it another Linux partition.

Once that was done, I got a message about bootloader not being able to accept changes or something along those line. When I boot up into Linux in verbose mode, it tells me that it cannont find ext3 partition and gives me kernel panic signal.

I fixed the problem. I used istallation CD, went into manual partitioning section and removed the partition that I incorrectly created. So I am back to my old installation Mandriva 2006.

But for future reference, how do I expand the size of my existing partition? For example, how would I correctly add this freed up section? Thanks.

Hi

I think the easiest way is to use a live cd -- Knoppix, boot up the system and then use QTParted, you will be able to resize the partition graphically then..
Cheers

Glad to hear that you fixed things on your own. Sorry i couldn't check in earlier and reply to your posts.

For future changes to any partitions do read about the following:

1) LILO or GRUB (or the bootloader of your choice). It needs to know which partition contains the OS in order to transfer control to it during the boot process.

2) /etc/fstab
http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/fstab.html

3) /etc/mtab
http://www.brunolinux.com/02-The_Ter..._and_Mtab.html

Good luck :)