Would GRUB crash if I repartitioned by local drives?

[Pipps]

I am considering resizing my local hard drives and possibly moving them around a little, within my local 500GB disk.

I have GRUB installed on the MBR, in a multi-boot system. If I were to change my current drive structure in any way, would this cause problems for GRUB?

What if I were to perform the partition changes solely from within GParted, in my local Ubuntu install?

I should be most grateful for any advice, as I would not wish to hurt my GRUB bootloader in any way! Thank you.

[devils casper]

If you shrink partitions and create new partitions after existing partitions, there won't be any GRUB problem.
Let me explain a bit more. Let say your Hard disk's partition structure is like this :

/dev/sda1 -- Other OS
/dev/sda2 -- Linux ( root partition )
/dev/sda3 -- Linux SWAP

Now if you shrink /dev/sda1, sda2, sda3 and move free space after /dev/sda3 to create new partitions, there won't be any problem. But if you create new partitions in between /dev/sda1 and sda2, partition number of /dev/sda2, sda3 will be changed and GRUB will not work correctly.

I would suggest you to post the output of sudo fdisk -l command. We have to check existing partition structure of your disk so that we can suggest you correctly.

sudo fdisk -l

* Its small L in fdisk -l.

Its easy to fix GRUB problem if you create partitions in between existing partitions. You have to edit only two files, /etc/fstab and menu.lst.

[vickey_20]

The MBR is installe in cylinder 0, head 0 , sector 1 of the HDD( I think on the sector 1 of the /boot partition . I m not sure about this part though). Unless you dont plan to delete and create a new partition you wont find yourself in trouble i.e shrking will not cause any problem if the structure is left the same and new partition is added in the end.