Grub2 fails to install to the MBR of /dev/sdb

[Greg Woods]

On Sat, 2012-01-14 at 00:47 -0800, Joe Zeff wrote:
> On 01/13/2012 06:32 PM, Greg Woods wrote:
> > I had read somewhere that you can only shrink partitions from the top
> > end. Was I wrong? That would be a lot easier than the dump/restore I had
> > been planning, similar to what Lester described.
> 
> You may be right.  If so, shrink the partition from the top, *move* it 
> so that the free space is at the bottom and Bob's your uncle.  Yes, it 
> takes a little time, but I'll bet it's faster than what you were 
> originally planning.

Turns out that it depends a lot on what you have on that first
partition. In my case, I've got a Dell laptop, and Dell always starts
the disk with a partition that contains Dell utilities, which is
separate from the Windows boot partition, which is separate from the
Windows OS partition (yes, three partitions for their standard Windows 7
install). So my first partition was just the Dell utility programs, so
it was easy to back it up, use fdisk to delete and recreate the first
partition starting at 2048 and ending the same place it did before, run
mkfs.vfat to recreate the file system, and restore the files. Presto!
Now I can actually make changes to my grub2 configuration and things
work.

If on the other hand your first partition were a bunch of LVM volumes,
you'd have a much bigger job ahead of you. For /boot as Lester
described, he can probably do it the way I did just as easily.

--Greg