Resizing partition

[trulex]

Why can't I resize my Kubuntu partition in KDE partition manager? It is possible to resize the windows partition but I want to split my kubuntu partition to install another distro. Any ideas?

[lo_koraco]

You can't resize a mounted partition, and you can't unmount it from a running system. You need to boot a Live CD and do the resizing. You can do that with the new distro you're installing, just boot the distro and run Gparted or the KDE partition manager, or parted from the command line. Gparted is the best tool for the job, the KDE partitioner is known to crap out during resizing operations.

[trulex]

ok, so I booted ubuntu live cd and resized it so the last 50gb were unallocated, successfully installed backtrack 5 and when it tried booting it, it worked, windows works also, only problem is that now I can't boot to kubuntu.. I have partitions like this: 100gb win7, 400gb data, 50gb kubuntu, 4gb swap, 50gb backtrack and it automatically made a 2gb swap for itself. If I boot into kubuntu recovery mode and run update-grub it does it like it should be, but the actual grub menu isn't right. help please

[SecretCode]

By backtrack do you mean BackTrack Linux - Penetration Testing Distribution? I presume it installed a version of GRUB and didn't detect all the OSes correctly.

When you boot as normal what GRUB version is shown at the top of the screen, and what OSes are listed?

I presume since you able to boot into Kubuntu recovery mode, your Kubuntu partition is listed in the GRUB menu. What actually happens when you try to do a normal boot of Kubuntu?

Anyway, if you can boot Kubuntu recovery mode from the hard disk, the way to reinstall Kubuntu's version of GRUB would be to run

sudo grub-install /dev/sda

substituting your actual drive sdb, hda, etc instead of sda if necessary

[trulex]

reinstalling Kubuntu's grub fixed the problem. thanks

[SecretCode]

Or run update-grub from the Live CD.

As I understand it, update-grub will only rewrite the grub.cfg file on the boot partition. If the MBR points to a different grub, you won't see any difference - that's when you need grub-install.