So, I’ve got a box here at home that is running a dual boot of Win XP and Debian.

I’ve got about 6/7 partitions on the disk. where Debian is somewhere around hda5/6 around and I’ve got a windows data partition on hda3(if I remember correctly).

Okay, so my linux partition is getting just abit full, and I do not want to have all my data on the FAT partition as linux mounts is not very “lekker” etc. So I need to remove the Windows partition and then create a new EXT2/3 partition for my data.

Okay, so first to find a partition manager - I used GParted LiveCD to delte and create the new partition - all nice and dandy… but when I boot up, I get a “Error 17″ from the MBR system… aaah - seems like the linux boot drive reference has change, where it was hda6 is is not hda 5 as a result of the partition preceeding it has been deleted….

This is the first time I’ve ran into this problem, previously I would only install linux with the help of an automated installer.

Okay, so the GRUB info on the MBR is wrong. So next I downloaded the GRUB bootup CD, entered a few “random“(just figured out whats what) commands to load the new config(GRUB on the ‘new’ partition reference) into the MBR.

and voila - now we’re back in business with my spanking new ext partition added and mounted.

written by Arné

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