HowtoIdentifyYourPartitions

Introduction

In some of the steps of Super Grub Disk documentation you will need to know which it is the notation for your GRUB partition in a Linux system. Here we will try to explain how to do it.

Quick Check

Open a terminal in GNOME: Applications -> System -> Terminal

Type:

fdisk -lu

you will see something like this:

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders, total 156301488 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xf6bca237

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2048 109563299 54780626 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 109563300 151187714 20812207+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 151187715 156296384 2554335 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Usually you should search for the line that ends in Linux (Not Linux Swap / Solaris) and that means that:

/dev/sda2

is your grub partition.

Safe Check

Some advanced users have a /boot partition or several Linux partitions. Although is optional you can check if there is grub in there with these commands (Supposing you are trying sda3):

mkdir /mnt/test
mount -t ext3 /dev/sda3 /mnt/test
ls -l /mnt/test/boot/grub/menu.lst
ls -l /mnt/test/grub/menu.lst
umount /mnt/test

If both ls commands prompt: File not found it means that there is no grub in sda3 partition and that you should check another partition in turn.