install problems

[ddm at mclinux.com (Derek Martin)]

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?

RedHat's installer (at least for RH 6.1 and earlier) won't install on a
disk > 8GB unless you make /boot a seperate partition.  This has to do
with an old limitation in LILO where it uses the BIOS representation of
the disk geometry, which only could access the first 8GB. If the partition
where /boot lived was larger than that 8GB, LILO couldn't boot it.

This limitation has since been removed from LILO, but the limitation in
the installer remains in at least RH <= 6.1 and I think 6.2 too but I'm
not sure.


-- 
Derek Martin
System Administrator
Mission Critical Linux
martin at MissionCriticalLinux.com 

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