[Wolves] Adding a new hard drive

[Adam Sweet]

On Tue, 2009-03-10 at 15:24 +0000, Howard Berry wrote:
> Hello All,
> I have been quite happy using Ubuntu so that I decided to get rid of
> XP . This was precipitated by the fact that I was also running out of
> disk space. Now I have been given some work to do using Sage and
> "Microsaft" Office. So I will have to put XP back. I have bought
> another hard drive and propose to move the current drive with Ubuntu
> on to the subsiduary bay so that I can install Windows where it will
> be happiest on the first hard drive.
> What I want to know is how I can get Ubuntu to put a new GRUB on the
> first hard drive without having to re install Ubuntu. Will I need to
> get rid of the old GRUB MBR?
> I suppose there is info somewhere on this, but you may be able to give
> me the griff straight away!
> Thanks,
> Howard Berry

One thing nobody has mentioned yet is that however you choose to
reinstall grub, you might have to edit /etc/fstab and change every
reference to sda or hda to be sdb or hdb, otherwise all the references
to your partitions will still be pointing to the first hard disk. That
is unless the lines which define your partitions start with UUID. Take a
look at that file before you do anything.

Marking your disks with a UUID means that you can shuffle your disks
around without worrying about BIOS disk recognitition order. The Ubuntu
installer seems to do that by default these days so you're probably ok.

Myself, I had to juggle machines a few years back while keeping the same
disks. I used to boot from an Ubuntu or Knoppix disk, mount my hard disk
partitions under /mnt, cd onto my root partition, chroot myself in there
and then reinstall grub, something like the following:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/reinstall-ubuntu-grub-bootloader-after-windows-wipes-it-out/

Regards,

Adam Sweet

-- 

http://blog.adamsweet.org/