On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 10:59:32AM -0700, 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 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....
If you want, send me privately the contents of /boot and I'll make an iso for you (or just learn how to use mkisofs and isolinux ;).
Are there any serious advantages/disadvantages to having /boot in the middle of the disk and / after it?
Not really, If you're using sata then I suppose your bios isn't limited as the older ones where.
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 partitions to the new locations, then update the grub.conf and voila! (I would hope....)
Don't forget /etc/fstab and rerun grub-install. Also, printout the output of sfdisk -d.
I'm also wondering about complications from having the swap and / partitions inside the extended partition....
Not really, but don't forget that the lower (ie., near the end) portions of harddisks are the slower ones.