Don't you ever need to unmount your linux's root partition ? No ? Why ? hummmm I don't know ? maybe to do special things on the FS like resizing it or moving it to a new device ? You can't unmount it while you running OS resides on it. If you can't boot on a livecd (no more optical disk player) nor a thumbdrive (you've lost all of them like me) you're doomed ! If only we could unoumnt this shitty partition.
What if you can ? We live in wonderful times. It's possible and not so hard. Let's go !
Turn off everything
To unmount your partition you'll first have to close any process using it. lsof will be your friend to find them. You can do this later but if downtime isn't a concern do it now.
If you have enough RAM you'll be able to restart services before it's done but it's a bit hackish especially if it alters your datas.
Recreating a userland in your ram
You have to create a new working userland in a ramdisk. So we create a mount point (mkdir /ramroot) then we will create the ramdisk in (mount -t tmpfs none /ramroot).
Everything you'll put in /ramroot won't be in your hard drive but in your ram.
Now there is two options : you can fit all your root partition in your ram (the easier) if not, you have to create a working userland from scratch (i won't tackle this part but you can help yourself with tools like debootstrap or using a stage3 from gentoo or any trustable userland from the internet).
So wee cp -ax /{bin,etc,sbin,lib32,lib64,lib} /ramroot then to spare some ram mkdir /ramroot/usr then cp -ax /usr/{bin,sbin,lib32,lib64} /ramroot/usr . And voilà you have everything you want in your userpace !
Everything ? No. You need the "special mounts".
mkdir /ramroot/dev /ramroot/sys /ramroot/proc you will have your mounting folders. Now you have to populate them. You already have them on your hard drive so you can just bind them here. Just mount --rbind /dev /ramroot/dev then mount --rbind /proc /ramroot/proc and mount -t proc none /ramroot/proc. Perfect !
Leap of faith
You have your marvelous userspace available in your ramdisk. We can now migrate ther.
First mkdir /ramroot/oldroot will be the new home to our hard drive root partition. We can now do the magic trick :
pivot_root /ramroot /ramroot/oldroot
It's okay ? You're still here ? Ok so it's done. You are inside you ramdisk. You can unmount /dev/sda1 and admire your hard work.
You can do anything you want on the partition. You can take a break. It's relatively easy if you think about it.
Coming back
You want to get back to your main partition without rebooting ? Easy : you mount /dev/sda2 /old/root and you pivot_root /oldroot /oldroot/ramroot and you're back.