Boot Failure – How to Repair Boot Failure Due to Moved Boot Sector

The easy way, IMO, is to boot the Ubuntu desktop CD. You can then use gparted to copy-paste your partitions.

The only trick with gparted is that you have to apply the changes one setp at a time.

Delete sda1 -> apply changes -> copy sda3 -> paste -> apply changes.

Once you have copied the partition you can also use gparted to create a new UUID

Select the partition → New UUID

Mount the partition at /mnt

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

Edit fstab, enter the new UUID under the entry for the root file system.

List the UUID, if needed, with blkid

blkid

gksu gedit /mnt/etc/fstab

Re-install / update grub

sudo grub-install --boot-directory=/mnt/boot /dev/sda

See also:

• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MovingLinuxPartition
• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UsingUUID
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BEZJmKqxYs

Looking at your setup, I believe you are having a MBR disk and therefore am using a extended partition. This is why you were experiencing the problem. The limitation with MBR is that you can't have more than 4 primary partitions. So what is usually done when you want more than 4 partitions on a MBR disk is to create 3 primary partitions, and make the fourth one an extended partition. Now inside the extended partition you can create multiple logical partitions.

This is the setup you have. You had sda1, sda3 and the windows partition as primary partitions and sda2 is your extended partition within which you have sda5 and sda6 (logical partitions).

Whenever you want to increase the size of a logical partition, you need to first increase the size of the extended partition within which it is contained, and then increase the size of logical partitions in it.

Even if you did not understand what I just told you, never mind, I will walk you through the steps.

1. You can't modify partitions that are mounted. So the first step is to right click on each partition with a 'key' symbol next to them and unmount them.
2. Move sda3 to the right to create enough unalocated space between sda6 and sda3.

3. Now you should be able to expand sda2, your extended partition to take up the free space.

4. Finally Expand the size of your home(sda6) partition.

A Tip: You could use a bit more swap space to increase your system performance. So while you are at it, before step 3, move the existing sda6 1 or 2 GB to the right and expand your swap space.