Fedora fails to boot with systemd-journald failing

[Tim]

Tim:
>> Not really a good idea, but most particularly not keeping boot
>> separate.  Nothing wrong with the other stuff being on one partition,
>> you just need to make the change carefully.

Daniel Landau:
> There's no reason why you couldn't keep everything on one partition.
> One possible reason could be having an ext2 boot partition and
> something more exciting for the rest, but I don't think my problem is
> with booting off ext4.

Everything but boot can easily be in one partition, but there's one very
good reason that boot *may* *need* to be in its own partition at the
start of the drive:  Some BIOSes just can't read far enough into a drive
to start booting up.  And what may seem to work, at first, may fail
later on, as newer files (needed to boot the system) get written further
into the drive.  Such as when you install new kernels.

So, it (no boot partition) could well be a cause of a failure to boot,
though I'm not sure what sort of error message you'll see when that is
the problem.  I'd expect some sort of file not found error, though.

I like partitioning the installation, so that should a drive error
happen, or the system does a check when it thinks there may be one, it's
a lot quicker to check a small partition than one huge one.  Not to
mention that a file screw-up in a non-home partition is far less likely
to screw up personal files.  And having a separate home partition makes
updating a lot easier:  You can update a system, and keep personal files
in place.  My current preference for a minimally partitioned system is
boot, /, and home.  If I were doing more partitions, or spreading across
drive, I like separate var and tmp.

Other people see other advantages to partitioning:  Such as different
file systems, or mounting options, for different partitions, more
optimum to that part of the system.

I have, in the past, moved partitions like you've done.  Copied the
files to the new location, unmounted the old partition.  Generally it
worked without any dramas, other than remembering to set permissions
correctly on the tmp directory.  Sometimes a relabelling may be needed,
depending on how you copied/moved things over.  But you'd need to be
able to boot up, first, for that.  Again, you'd get a different kind of
error message than you mentioned.

Moving boot requires more than just copying files, and changing
pointers.  There are bootloaders in the partitions.

How did you do the copying?  With a file manager, the command line, done
as the root user?

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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