Can't boot after MINT partition size reduction

[msd123]

I did a clean install of Mint 10 (Gnome), wiping the previous Vista install.

I defaulted the partition section, so ended up with a big main partition and a small swap partition.

Everything worked fine.

A few days later I rebooted using a Gparted live CD and reduced the size of the main partition to make room for something else. I expected this might lead to problems but reasoned I might be able to overcome them and learn something in the process .

I was right about that (the first part, anyway). Now when I boot, I get a GRUB menu, offering me a normal boot, a recovery mode, command line etc. The boot option doesn't work though - it says "an error occurred while mounting /sys".

I tried the Grub option to edit the (hidden) menu. I expected that maybe the UUID in the menu would be wrong after the resizing. However, when I boot from a Live USB stick and do "sudo blkid", I see that the UUID has NOT changed.

I can always do another install, but I'd prefer to fix this another way if possible.

[vrkalak]

Agreed, a re-install would work (and be easier) but learning how to fix things myself is more satisfying.

I have these links in my 'bookmarks'
From the looks it they might give you some useful information for 'correcting' the problem.

http://www.backuphowto.info/linux-backu ... k-clone-dd
http://forums.techguy.org/linux-unix/84 ... hangs.html
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions ... on-510514/

I often resort to other Linux Forums for help, when I can't find it here.

[msd123]

Thanks for the reply.
One of those links mentioned the utility "resize2fs", which lead me to find this statement

To shrink a partition and it's filesystem, you have to:

1. Shrink the filesystem
2. Shrink the partition

which is bad news, since I only did step 2, and omitted step 1 (unless Gparted is sophisticated enough to have done it transparently).

Having said that, all I did in Gparted was move the right-hand end of the 1st partition to the left. What I was left with was still way bigger than the partition space actually used so hard to see why this would bother the filesystem ...

Anyway, I decided to do a 2nd fresh install - next time I'll try to shrink the f/s first.