On Fri, Mar 28, 2008, Les Mikesell wrote:
Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
On Fri, 28 Mar 2008 at 4:32pm, Ross S. W. Walker wrote
I think you might be missing a little something in there, like /boot?
/boot is not required to be its own partition. In the days of yore, when BIOSes couldn't boot from partitions the crossed the 1024 cylinder barrier, it made sense to have a small /boot as your first partition. These days? Not so much.
There are still good reasons to keep it separate. For example you may want / on something grub doesn't understand like LVM or raid (raid1 can pretend it isn't, but other levels won't work. Or you may want to move your / to a drive other than the one that boots.
I used to use the separate /boot partition, but quit when the 1024 sector problem was solved, mostly because OS upgrades or installation of alternate distributions in a different partition for ``/'' would frequently result in a less than useful /boot setup. Having /boot on the ``/'' file system isn't as vulnerable to poorly written installation and upgrade scripts.
Being a belts and suspenders guy, I don't boot from raid or lvm file systems as there are too many ways things can go bad.
I generally build systems with two identical ext3 partitions for ``/'' and ``/backroot', swap, and the remainder in ``/home''. Once the system is installed and configured, the ``/'' is copied to ``/backroot'' with the ``/backroot/etc/fstab'' file edited appropriately and ``/boot/grub/menu.lst'' set up to allow booting from the ``/backroot'' partion (which isn't normally mounted).
This provides the ability to boot a damaged system from ``/backroot'', and a fallback position if an upgrade goes south by refreshing the copy just prior to doing the upgrade.
Bill -- INTERNET: bill@celestial.com Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC URL: http://www.celestial.com/ PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way FAX: (206) 232-9186 Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676
It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees! -- Emiliano Zapata.