Knoppix

I never fail to be amused and surprised by what I can get away with when using knoppix. I had installed Ubuntu as a dual-boot with Vista, and got grub errors on the reboot because the partition was too far out on the disk. The older BIOS can't read beyond the 1024 sector limit and the LBA on that BIOS isn't adaptive. So, I need to move partitions. Fine. Knoppix can do that.

First, "sudo testdisk" to repair the MBR so windows can boot. Reboot into windows and shutdown cleanly so that I can move the partition. Resizing it will take about 15 minutes. I'll make a 4 gig FAT32 boot partition and a 4 gig EXT4 partition in the beginning of the drive so both windows and linux can find their boot systems.

Parted on Knoppix runs fast and easy. I'd already installed Ubuntu so I don't need to redo that. I'm strictly moving partitions around, and then I'll reinstall grub so that it can find them. This laptop had no windows boot partition so I'm creating that using a freedos option. That way there's a windows rescue option if there are any viral problems.

Back in the old days it would have been a complete reinstall of both linux and windows to fix these issues.