Partition confusion

Dave Andruczyk djandruczyk at yahoo.com
Mon Nov 10 13:25:13 EST 2003


--- jb <mesimpleton at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I'm just curious about not having a /boot partition. All the info I have
> says you need to make one, but one reference says it is a recommended
> partition. That leads me to believe there may be other ways. This
> appears to be the other way? If someone could touch on the subject I
> would appreciate it. When I made my /boot partition, I tried 50 meg and
> RedHat install complained and said it had to be at least 75 meg?
> Thanks,
> JB

LAst message got sent premature..

/boot is recommended primarily to keep the kernel SEPARATE from the /
filesystem. (/boot is recommended to be mounted Read only to avoid corruption
if you crash your box, just remount as ReadWrite when you update your kernel)
This way if you accidentally run "rm -rf * from "/" you won't erase your
kernel.

Another reason to use /boot is if you use a "/" filesystem that isn't supported
by grub/lilo.  The /boot filesystem is formatted ext2 or ext3 (which can be
mounted as ext2)  and contains the kernel and initrd image to load to provide
the necessary kernel modules for the root filesystem. (xfs, jfs, reiserfs, etc)

The reason why redhat barfed when you tried to make it 50 megs, was that redhat
likes to use ext3 FS's.  A typical EXT3 filesystem uses a 32 Meg journal.  Thus
you'de only have 18 megs free space for a 50 meg partition.   I recommend
100megs for /boot...


=====
Dave J. Andruczyk

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