[CentOS] Re: Installation problem, possibly RAID

[Edward Diener]

Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-09-10 at 17:24 -0400, Edward Diener wrote:
> 
>>Just though I mentioned that I got CentOS installed properly by not using a boot 
>>partitition and just installing everything into a root partition. Why this bug 
>>insists on my machine, and whether it exists for others for some reason is 
>>something I do not know. My guess is that grub booting on a boot partition and 
>>executing programs on a root partition needs to know the disk geometry of the 
>>root partition and is not doing that properly on my machine for some reason or 
>>another.
> 
> 
> I pretty much killed the "/boot as a separate slice" option years ago.
> Too many little nagging headaches, especially with GRUB (although LILO
> itself is another headache).
> 
> About the only time you need it is for MD (software) RAID.  But if I
> need RAID, I throw in a 3Ware (ATA/SATA) or LSI (SCSI/SATA) card.
> So that removes that issue for myself.

I was doing it so that if I ever needed to move my root partition, while keeping 
the same partition order, I would not need to reinitialize grub on the boot 
partition. I was told however that grub does not have the smarts to recognize 
where its root partition is at run-time so that I would have to reinitialize it 
anyway if I moved my root partition.

In general Linux's reliance on partition order in mounting hard disk partitions, 
and evidently grub's reliance on specific hardcoded hard disk geometry in order 
to find its root partition, seem primitive to me. I could be wrong but I thought 
that hard disk information on PCs was a pretty well determined thing and a 
better system would automatically detemine these things at run-time. Of course 
MS Windows does not allow a separate boot partition at all and also relies on 
partition order, so my remarks go to Windows as well as Linux.

In these days of large hard disks, boot loaders which can boot multiple 
operating systems, and partition managers which can move and image hard disk 
partitions at will, a better system for OSs to find what they need on hard disks 
is needed.