Alternative booting

[Chris Jones]

> 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?

Putting your /boot as a simple directory under / is never a good idea. I'm 
sure this is your problem and not problems with grub itself.

 Depends how many kernels you want to be able to keep at once. As a guide I 
currently have 3 kernels in my /boot, and its using 20M of space. That means 
100M is good for roughly 15 kernels - Usually more than enough for anyone.

>
> > 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. 

Actually it does. Its just users don't often stumble over them so often.

Chris