This is how to move the boot of your 10.10 to the separate partition:
Having /boot on its own partition is useful if you use many linux
distributions, especially on different hard disks. Besides, if your
root filesystem gets corrupted, you’ll still be able to boot if your /boot
is separate.
Let’s get started.. first of all we need to create a new ext3 partition
which will be our new /boot. In order to decide how big it should be, let’s
see how much space our current /boot is taking up. A value of 100Mb should
suffice for most needs (unless you’re a kernel hacker with lots of images
in /boot):
$ du -h /boot
Once we have an idea about the size, go ahead and create the partition. You
can use GParted… or if you prefer the command line, use mkfs:
# mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hda#
Now let’s assume that the partition you just created is /dev/hdaX (replace X
with the actual digit). We’ll proceed as follows (prepend sudo before each
command, or relogin as root):
1. # mkdir /mnt/newboot
2. # mount /dev/hdaX /mnt/newboot
3. # cp -dpR /boot/* /mnt/newboot/
4. # mv /boot /oldboot
5. # mkdir /boot
6. # nano -w /etc/fstab
and modify the /boot line to:
/dev/hdaX /boot ext3 ro 0 0
Note that we want /boot to be mounted read-only after the OS boot process.
You can also delete the whole entry altogether to prevent /boot from being
mounted.
7. # umount /mnt/newboot
8. # mount /dev/hdaX /boot
9. # nano -w /boot/grub/menu.lst
Now change the entries corresponding to your old root partition to /dev/hdaX.
In grub’s terms, that translates to (hd0,X-1) if it’s the first hard drive.
For eg, /dev/hda8 is (hd0,7). Note that you also need to change /boot/xxx.x
entries to /xxx.x since the /boot partition is itself the root partition in
grub’s eyes. For eg, /boot/grub becomes /grub. Finally, install grub onto the
MBR. Issue:
10. # grub-install /dev/hda
(Replace /dev/hda with the /dev/… entry of the hard disk where you want to
install Grub to).
All done! Now reboot.
P.S: Any time you want to write to /boot, do a:
$ sudo mount -o remount,rw /boot
Reference: http://tekguru.wordpress.com/2007/09/04/howto-moving-boot-to-its-own-partition/
And this is how to edit the automatic entries:
Creating the Custom Menu
The user can either edit the default /etc/grub.d/40_custom file or create a
new one. The easiest way to create the content of a custom menu is to copy a
working entry from /boot/grub/grub.cfg. Once copied, the contents of
40_custom can be tailored to the user's desires.
According to the default sample custom file (/etc/grub.d/40_custom) the
first two lines of any custom file in /etc/grub.d should be:
#!/bin/sh
exec tail -n +3 $0
The user can copy existing menuentries from the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file (...)
General menuentry Construction Rules:
The first line must start with menuentry and end with {
The area between the quotation symbols is what will appear on the GRUB 2 menu.
Edit as desired.
The last line of the menuentry must be }
Do not leave empty spaces at the end of lines
The set root= line should point to the GRUB 2 /boot location ( (hdX,Y) )
The root reference in in the linux line should point to the system partition.
If GRUB 2 cannot find the referenced kernel, try replacing the UUID with the
device name (example: /dev/sda6 ).
A sample entry copied from the grub.cfg and altered by the user might look
like this:
menuentry "My Default Karmic" {
set root=(hd0,1)
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set cb201140-52f8-4449-9a95-749b27b58ce8
linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-11-generic root=UUID=cb201140-52f8-4449-9a95-749b27b58ce8 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.31-11-generic
}
Reference: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2