Bruce Park wrote:
Hello all, First, thanks for all those to that replied with the original question.OK, I have more question regarding cfdisk. I've successfully created the boot, swap, and root partition. Here are some questions that still linger in my head. 1. Should I make the /boot bootable? I'm dual booting with Windows2000 and the bootable flag is defaulted to /dev/hda1(w2k). I've been using redhat linux before with grub. Still it seems like I should make /boot bootable. Should I? Also, what file system type should this be? It is defaulted at ext3
I have never been able to figure out what the point of the bootable flag is. I still have my w2k partition as the only partition set to bootable, but I have lilo installed in the mbr and booting linux by default so I don't think it matters.
2. The size of /boot is another question. From the previous installation of linux. it is at 49MB. I've read that this should be 10MB. I plan to install grub later when the installation is over. Which size is more desiarable?
10MB seems a little small. I currently have 5 kernels in my /boot directory/partition taking up 16MB. I don't have a good reason for two of them being there and if I got rid of them I could get just under 10MB, but it seems easier to just have a larger partition since it doesn't really hurt anything. Also, the default debian kernels use an initrd.img which takes up a good amount of room. It is possible that the source recommending 10MB didn't use initrd.img's and consequently didn't take this into account. My boot partition is about 22MB, but that was almost an arbitrary number(it is the size of 3 cylinders[there is one cylinder between the start and end point]). The real question is whether another partition having an extra 30 MB would make a difference. If you have a 40GB or up hard drive[or even 20GB and up], the answer is probably no, and the path of least resistance would be to stick with the size you have. I have also since discovered that there isn't a whole lot of point to having a separate /boot partition, but it doesn't hurt.
3. File system type for the root paritition; I would like to use ext3 but I cannot find the corresponding number for it. Does woody support ext3? I'm thinking the only thing that I can use it 83 which is just "Liunx."
83 is the number of all my ext3 partitions. Since cleanly unmounted ext3 partitions can be mounted ext2, it makes sense that the two file systems would have the same id.