Moving /boot to a separate partition

Question

I've installed Ubuntu 12.04 on a partition with BTRFS as its file system, but it appears that grub2 seems to have some issues with that file system. For some reason it takes it very long time to boot and it doesn't display OS-selection screen at all.

So I decided to move my /boot to a separate partition with ext2 file system. But I don't know what steps exactly should I take to do it. Please, help! :)

Answer 1

Roughly speaking:

1. Create a partiton and format to ext2
2. Copy contents from old /boot folder to new partition root
3. Edit fstab with a separate boot entry, and run grub-install for the new boot location (using the --boot-directory= option)
4. Boot and pray

It might be more convenient to do this from a liveCD (can easier be fixed if something goes wrong then).

Answer 2

You could do it with GParted. Follow this steps:

1. Install GParted at the software center or with sudo apt-get install gparted in the terminal.
2. Unmont the /boot partition, in example: sudo unmont /dev/sda7 supposing that the /boot partition is on /dev/sda7. If you don't know where is it, you can look at GParted.
3. Execute it and enter your root's password when it asks for it.
4. Now, click on /dev/sda7 (of course, assuming that /boot is on /dev/sda7). Then, click on the Remove Partition button.
5. After removing it, select the new unassigned space, and then click on Create new partition.
6. Now, just create a new boot partition as you did in the installation process. When you end, click on the Apply all the changes button.
7. Install grub on it: sudo grub-install /dev/sda7 (assuming that the new partition was /dev/sda7).

Restart, and it should work. I hope it so! And tell us if it worked!