Alternative booting

[David Krings]

Chris Jones wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Out of interest, when you install F7 where do you put the /boot partition ? 
> I.e. is it a separate small 100M or so partition at the start of your drive, 
> or do you make it a simple directory under your main / partition ?

I put it all into one partition. The multipartition setup wa sintroduced 
to me as an advantage solely when one wants to remove/replace sections 
of the system or is forced to do so when using small drives. As neither 
is the case for my setup I didn't bother with it. I also never know on 
how large to make those partitions. Will a 100M partition be big enough?


> The fact that you find grub broken only after updates is odd. Note that the 
> point of a separate /boot is to make sure all the files needed by grub are at 
> the start of the drive, where the bios can access them. If you don't do this 
> then what might happen is files get written to grub that reside in parts of 
> the drive that cannot be read at boot time, hence problems. This could also 
> explain why things work for the first install but then break after updates.

Which is interesting as other OS don't have that problem. At least W2k 
doesn't. I used to have a system where I had the boot partition fairly 
far to the end and way after the 1024 block limit. But, it did drop the 
ntloader into the first partition. So why not give an option to write 
the kernel data onto the first partition regardless of what that is, 
although....it then needs to be able to read NTFS. I guess that would be 
asking too much.

Too bad that there isn't a way to make Linux load from ntloader.


David