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 at 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.