Managing Partitions with Linux

Well, this morning I decided to move around my partition tables on our main gaming computer — yeah, I know, silly idea, right?

“Why do you keep fucking around with stuff if it’s working fine?”

Because if I didn’t, I’d never learn anything new, would I? :P

Anyway… I moved around the partition tables (I wanted to make one partition bigger), and all of a sudden Ubuntu wouldn’t boot correctly anymore.

I mean, it worked, but it would hang during boot and give me a terminal screen. At this point, I could safely press Ctrl-D to continue the boot process, and everything would be fine. Annoying, but workable, I guess… but I want to know how to fix it.

So, I notice it’s hanging on something called “fsck” during the boot process (some kind of disk management utility for Linux), so I google it along with the word “Ubuntu,” and it leads me to this page:

fsck.ext3: Unable to resolve

Turns out that in your “/etc/fstab” file in your Linux installation are a collection of entries regarding which boot partitions will be loaded at boot time, and there was an old entry for the drive that I had resized (I had actually deleted it and created a bigger one, now that I think about it).

I just commented out the line (with a “#” character) that referred to the old drive that I had deleted, and whatta-you-know… it works. No more dumping to the terminal screen during boot.

Now, the partition manager I used is called Parted Magic/ — it’s a great little application that comes in the form of a bootable CD (by way of .ISO file). It’s got an amazing GUI-based interface (looks like it’s based a bit on KDE), and is easy as crap to use, trust me. It runs amazingly fast and has booted fine on every computer I’ve tried. Try it!