Freeing the beginning of a partition with the ext3 filesystem

[Soeren D. Schulze]

Hello,

I have put a new HD into an old computer in order to extend its disk
space.  I had not thought carefully enough and just created one huge
partition that covers the whole HD.

Now, after some weeks, I have decided to remove the other old HD, which
requires to make the new one bootable.  The problem is that the BIOS is
quite old and can only see the first 8 gigabytes.  The obvious solution
would be to create a boot partition, the problem is how to do it.

I know that parted cannot resize the filesystem by moving its beginning,
so I thought I would resize at the end it and then move it completely.
But I have not even come so far: parted thinks that my filesystem has "a
rather strange layout".  I have heard rumors that there are problems
with filesystems created by newer e2fsprogs, but I cannot find anything
in the archive because of the spam flooding.

Now do you have any idea how to do this?  If there is a solution without
parted, this will be fine enough for now, but currently, I have just no
idea.  Note that there is little space actually used on the filesystem,
but using resize2fs had not worked for some reason: both parted and
e2fsck complained that the partition was smaller than the filesystem
after recreating the partition.  Moreover, how would I duplicate a
partition?  Does dd do the job?


Sören