Reconfigure to boot from extended partition?

[NoOp]

On 08/27/2007 11:29 AM, Rashkae wrote:
> Derek Broughton wrote:
> 
>> 
>> All that said (and correctly), I think you might actually have been asking
>> about the "bootable" flag on the partition table, and afaik it's completely
>> irrelevant to Linux - only Windows cares about that flag.
> 
> 
> Not always.
> 
> you can install either grub or lilo on the superblock of a partition, 
> (and a corresponding Windows Style mbr to boot from 'bootable' or 
> 'active' parition).
> 
> Examples where this *might* be useful:
> 
> On a system where you expect to install/re-install windows often.. You 
> can repair your grub after a Windows install with any fdisk type 
> utility, rather than the usual grub install process.
> 
> If, for whatever reason of your own, you want multiple grub boot 
> menus/versions on one disk.  you can switch between the different grub 
> environments by chancing the active partition.
> 
> But I digress.  By default, grub is installed in the MBR of the hard 
> drive, in which case, the partition boot flag has no bearing, as you say.
> 

Update: I decided that given this is a new alternate machine (for me
anyway) that I'd just wipe the 40G drive and repartition it properly.
That way I hopefully won't run into the same problem in the future.

I'd already copied all of the critical data to another machine, so the
only thing that I lost was the desktop settings & added programs in the
process.

I followed Sundar's instructions to reload all of the programs (see:
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.user/121271 / Re:
Identical Package-list) & then only had to remove ubuntu-desktop,
install the official OpenOffice, SeaMonkey and a couple of others that I
installed via dpkg directly.

Now what I'd like to do is to copy the home directory of the other
computer easily to the new one. I know that I can 'cp -ax' the home
directory folders to an alternate drive, but I'd like to direct the copy
to a tar file that retains the file permissions and that I can move to
the new system; haven't quite figure out how to do that properly
(yet:-). Fortunately I'm at the stage that if I screw things up, I can
try an alternate method.