Hi Everyone,

I have an eee PC mico laptop with Xandros Linux on it. The laptop and Xandros are both great, only issue I've been experiencing is that the kernel partition filled up way too quickly, as I only have a total of 20 GB between the two solid state hard drives on my laptop. The allocated partition to kernel is only 3.5 Gigs.

Xandros kernel has two partitions, one is the one named System which is an ext2 and the other one which is smaller and I think acts as as SWAP partition, which is an ext3.

I've used PartedMagic to boot up the laptop from USB and copied both of the kernel partitions to the second hdd and increased their size.

First hard drive still contains the BIOS partition, the original two kernel partitions, and another one of type EFI which is only 7.84 MB . The next step would be to get rid of the kernel partitions on the first hdd and boot from the second one.

Is it safe to delete the kernel partitions on the first hdd and change the boot media in BIOS setup to the second hdd ? Do I need to copy BIOS and the other partition to the second hard drive as well ? Anything else I need to do to get my laptop booting happily from the second hdd ?


Thanks,
Shukuboy

A swap partition is never a file system. So either this partion is not swap or it is not an ext3 file system. If it is really a swap partition then don't copy it. Just format the new swap partition with the mkswap command. See:

man mkswap


I suggest that you do this in the reverse order. Make sure that booting to the second HDD works. You can add an entry to the /boot/grub/menu.lst on your first drive to boot into the kernel on your second drive for testing purposes.

You will have to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst on the second drive to make it correspond to the new drive configuration. Then boot into the second drive and use grub-install to install the new version of grub on the MBR. Make sure that you are using the /boot/grub/menu.lst file on the second drive before you delete /boot/grub/menu.lst on the first HDD. Otherwise your grub bootloader will stop working when you delete the kernel partitions on the first drive.

Also edit the file /etc/fstab on your second drive to make sure that fstab points to the partitions on the second drive, not the first.

Once you have your second drive /boot/grub/menu.lst, grub-install, and /etc/fstab set up and working then you can delete the kernel partitions on the first drive.


I don't know what the BIOS partition is. If the other partition is swap then format it as described above. If the other partition is something other than swap then yes, it should be copied.



You will have to change fstab on the second drive as described above. Also once you get menu.lst set up correctly on the second drive then you will have to boot into the second drive and use grub-install to put a new copy of grub on the MBR of the second drive.

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Steve Stites

Thanks very much Steve for the comprehensive and in-detail reply. This has been quite helpful.

One thing I'm still struggling with right now is the changes I've made to menu.lst aren't detected by grub. I've removed hiddenmenu option and updated the timeout to 10seconds but still don't see the grub menu.

Any ideas ?

Cheers,
Shukuboy.

Does the grub on the MBR point to the same menu.lst that you are editing? If not then use the grub-install command to reinstall grub on the MBR.

Or you could make the changes in the menu.lst that the MBR is currently pointing to.

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Steve Stites