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I was trying to make room for an Arch Linux installation and I ran parted and shrunk my main Ubuntu partition.

I made a new one in the new space but after I rebooted it put me in a grub prompt.

I found out how to manually boot but it dropped me to an initramfs busybox. I looked for information online and found something about the superblock saying the fs is too big which makes sense so I used mke2fs and fsck to fix it.

However there were a bunch of errors and after it fixed the fs most of my stuff was missing and I still boot into the initramfs busybox.

Can this be fixed? Should I go to a professional?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Dessa Simpson
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1 Answers1

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Apparently it's because parted only shrunk your partition but not the ext4 filesystem on it. Unlike gparted, parted no longer does anything with the filesystem layer. So you need to shrunk the ext4 with resize2fs first.

made a new one in its space

If you only created a partition (but not formatted it with any mkfs.* yet), you can probably delete the new partition, and extend the shrunk partition again. If it mounts again correctly, then you can shrink it again with the aforementioned proper procedures. You may also want to run fsck first before you mount it.

However, if the new partition has been formatted already, there is almost certainly data lost. For that you may need a more "professional" approach to rescue it.

Dessa Simpson
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Tom Yan
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