install problems

[david at kramer.ne.mediaone.net (David Kramer)]

On Tue, 30 May 2000, Ron Peterson wrote:

> Mike Bilow wrote:
> > 
> > There is no need for /boot to be a separate partition.  Unless you have a
> > special situation, /boot is usually an ordinary directory below the
> > partition mounted as the root filesystem (/).
> 
> I've only used Red Hat.  Their installation manual recommends that /boot
> have its own partition, 16MB max.  They say this is a good idea "Due to
> the limitation of most PC BIOSes", but they don't elaborate further. 
> What are they talking about?

The way that hard drive partition tables are laid out, there is only 2
bytes for the cylinder number.  So only cylinders <1024 can be referenced.  
Because of this the partition that contains the /boot directory (and I
believe the swap partition too) must reside completely within the first
1024 cylinders.  

With hard drives coming as large as they do today, it's hard to have your
entire root partition within that boundary.  So one solution is to have
/boot on it's own partition within that limit, then have the root
partition wherever you want.


-- 

-------------------------------------------------------------------
DDDD   David Kramer                   http://kramer.ne.mediaone.net
DK KD  
DKK D  Science without religion is lame,
DK KD  religion without science is blind.
DDDD              Albert Einstein

-
Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with
"subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" on the first line of the
message body to discuss-request at blu.org (Subject line is ignored).