Repartition boot drive without booting from a LiveCD

[SheeEttin]

I'm in a bit of a bind. I want to repartition my main drive (or at least shift the partitions around a bit), but I have a problem.

I only have this one drive, and I can't boot into a LiveCD environment by any conventional means. I don't know why, it just doesn't work.

I tried this, but it gets as far as part way through the boot process, where it halts with an error like "NMI watchdog detected LOCKUP on CPU 0". I've also since changed CD drives, and the SATA CD drive isn't supported, apparently. So that's out anyway.

Selecting a different boot source in the BIOS doesn't work, it just says "Booting from CD : " and then loads Grub. (This is, actually, standard behavior, i.e. it happens every time I boot.)
I've tried putting Grub on a floppy and trying to boot that way, but it gives a read error and doesn't do anything. (I tried with three different floppies, all of which seem to be working fine otherwise.)
I also tried booting from a CD with the Grub on my drive, but I can't figure out how to set the root device to anything other than (hd0,*). (If that's at all possible. I've also got a USB Flash drive with a copy of the LiveCD on it.)

So, anyone have any bright ideas, short of putting the drive in another computer? The only other one I have is IDE-only, and the last time I borrowed someone else's computer, I ended up accidentally installing Grub over the Windows boot loader.

[dibl]

Re: Repartition boot drive without booting from a LiveCD

I can't boot into a LiveCD environment by any conventional means. I don't know why, it just doesn't work.

Eeeewwwwww! That's not good, eh?

I think I'd be investigating the IDE setup, in BIOS as well as on the actual cable and on the jumper blocks on the drives (I'm assuming it is an IDE hard drive and the CD ROM on the same cable). Is the hard drive the "master" and the CD ROM the "slave" in BIOS? Are the jumpers on the devices set to "cable select". I think if the jumpers are not set to the "cable select" ("cs") position, then you can't change them in BIOS, so you normally want them set up to be "cs".

That's all I can think of that might make a difference, beyond the obvious requirement to have the CD ROM as the first device in the BIOS "boot device sequence" lineup.

[eriefisher]

Re: Repartition boot drive without booting from a LiveCD

You could repartition using QTparted or Gparted installed on your system. Theoretically if you where root and unmounted all but the / partition you could "adjust" them. You cannot however unmount your / partition?

Just thinking out load here.

eriefisher

[SheeEttin]

Re: Repartition boot drive without booting from a LiveCD

dibl: SATA drive. And yes, CD-ROM is first in boot sequence.
eriefisher: You can't repartition the drive your OS is on. It'd be hell to try and keep track of everything getting moved around and use it at the same time.

[dibl]

Re: Repartition boot drive without booting from a LiveCD

Ah -- but is the CD/DVD drive a SATA drive also? If it is IDE, can you make it "master", either with the jumper on the device, or in BIOS? Seems like most PCs love to boot from the IDE bus before the SATA bus. Or not, in your case?

[SheeEttin]

Re: Repartition boot drive without booting from a LiveCD

Yes, it is. I have no IDE drives at all. (Well, I do have one in a bay, but it's not hooked up to anything.)
The drive is recognized by the BIOS, as is my Flash drive. It lists hardware as it detects it.

EDIT: Hmm, something just occurred to me while I was in the shower... Perhaps if I put the drive in my Windows machine and use a Windows version of dd to write a LiveCD to the drive, I might just be able to boot from it!
Be nice to finally resolve this after all this time.