<p dir="ltr">I've done similar with a Parted Magic boot CD on a hand full of systems. It is a little nerve wracking the first few times, but it works. I'll second messing with a VM first, and even then, take a full disk image before you get too carried away. :-) </p>
<p dir="ltr">FWIW,</p>
<p dir="ltr">Matt</p>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Jul 19, 2014 9:05 PM, "David L. Anselmi" <<a href="mailto:anselmi@anselmi.us">anselmi@anselmi.us</a>> wrote:<br type="attribution"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
I kinda like GRUB2, compared to GRUB (which I used little) and LILO (which I used instead of GRUB to<br>
support /boot on LVM). But the installed image seems to be growing, which means it doesn't fit in<br>
the 32kB available at the beginning of my disks (they're old and 32kB used to be standard).<br>
<br>
I tried finding a way to shrink down the image, removing things that weren't essential. But that<br>
seems really hard, or at least poorly documented.<br>
<br>
So I'm currently keeping my boot loaders on other media. Not terribly convenient.<br>
<br>
The difficult part of this is that making the free blocks at the beginning of the disk larger<br>
requires moving the beginning of the first partition, which is LVM and probably contains the<br>
beginning of an ext3/4 file system. Scooting a file system further back on the disk doesn't seem<br>
very possible.<br>
<br>
It occurs to me that perhaps I can move the LVM extents at the beginning of the partition and then<br>
change the start of the partition without ext3/4 being aware of the change. So that might be nice,<br>
but I suspect I'll have to have plenty of sleep in order to get it right. I guess practicing on<br>
something other than / is a good idea.<br>
<br>
Thanks for listening.<br>
Dave<br>
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