[CentOS] booting from a +2TB disk

[Les Mikesell]

On Sun, 2005-09-04 at 11:01, Peter Arremann wrote:
> On Sunday 04 September 2005 09:47, Andreas Rogge wrote:
> > Wouldn't it be much easier to use an IDE Flash Module for that?
> > You can get 128 MB IDE Flash for direct plugging to the ATA-Connector on
> > the mainboard for as few as 30 € (which is definitely not an issue, if
> > you have disk-arrays greater than 2 TB...).
> 
> Not a good idea... CF isn't meant for constant re-writes... you'd have to run 
> a special filesystem like JFFS that none of the major linux distributions 
> know how to do as an install... CF sized harddisks aren't much better - they 
> aren't meant to run 24/7 and so on... 

First, a USB flash drive should be inexpensive and sufficient.  Almost
everything these days should boot from USB.  As for re-writing, how
often do you write anything to /boot?  However, like a boot iso, the
main problem is just that the scripts to set it up aren't included.
The mkbootbootdisk script might do just about the right thing for
usb, though.

> If you can at all efford it, you should always have a set of mirrored OS disks 
> and then do raid 0+1 or 5, depending on your space/speed/redundancy needs, 
> for the data. 

If you have more than 2TB you might not miss the space, but it seems
like a waste to dedicate a whole pair of hard drives to be able
to boot, which you might only do once a year or so.  I'd consider
the ability to generate a bootable iso to be a good thing in any
case, now that floppies no longer work.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com