Mark Hull-Richter wrote:
Due to the peculiar way that my root drive is configured (incomplete advance planning for Windows to Linux conversion), I have had thoughts about moving /boot and / to a different place on the drive. Current configuration is:
sda1 - 30Gb primary partition (was the E: drive) sda2 - 120 Gb primary partition (was my H: drive) sda3 - 100Mb /boot primary partition sda4 - Extended partition sda5 - 4Gb swap partition sda6 - 145Gb / partition
I was thinking about rearranging the disk to a more conventional layout
What problem are you trying to solve?
where /boot is first, swap next, / next and the rest after that. It probably isn't necessary since the drive runs fine (well, almost - last night /boot developed a weirdity in its superblock and I had to recover with the install DVD in rescue mode and using the alternate superblock, but it's back up and running, having survived the boot fsck), but I was wondering if anyone had tried something like this before. Besides, having a backup (or new) /boot might not be a bad idea after last night....
Are there any serious advantages/disadvantages to having /boot in the middle of the disk and / after it?
I was thinking that I could remove the 1 & 2 partitions, recreate them with a hole in between for a (new/replacement) swap, and copy the original
There is no advantage*, with Linux 2.6 kernels, to having a swap partition over having a swap file. Swap files are more flexible, easier to manage. As a Linux Kernel Engineer, you should know that;-)
* unless you're using suspend to disk, I'm not sure about that.
partitions to the new locations, then update the grub.conf and voila! (I would hope....)
I'm also wondering about complications from having the swap and / partitions inside the extended partition....
At one point I had RHEL Beta 5 Client and Server, SLED and SUSE 10.x on the one box. Might have had FC6 too. The only complication was that Anaconda couldn't handle repartitioning the drive.