On Sat, Nov 30, 2002 at 02:58:24PM -0500, Travis Crump wrote:
| 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.
It is for legacy systems. (legacy == Microsoft)
| 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.
The linux booters (lilo, grub, syslinux, etc.) don't care about that
flag. It is MS-DOS and MS Windows that cares. Its possible that it
only cares if you use an MS boot loader, it may not matter when you
chainload the windows boot loader. OTOH it may be that windows needs
the windows partition to be "bootable".
| >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.
A little, but not really too 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.
I agree. One of my machines doesn't have a separate /boot. It
currently uses 19MB with grub, memtest86 and 7 kernels. (Hmm, time to
do some cleanup, I only use one of them) The other machine has a 22MB
/boot partition with 16MB currently in use. It has grub, memtest86
and 6 kernels (need to do some cleanup there too).
| The real question is whether another partition having an extra 30 MB
| would make a difference.
Indeed. If you make the partition fairly large, then you'll likely
waste space because you won't be using all of it. OTOH, you don't
want to be lacking space later on. I'd say anywhere on the order of
10-30MB is sufficient unless you really want to have a lot of kernels
to switch around (but I don't see why anyone would want that unless
they're a kernel developer).
| 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.
Originally the point was to put the kernel below the 1024 cylinder.
On legacy x86 machines the boot loader was unable to read any portion
of the disk above that cylinder. Modern motherboard+disk combos and
recent versions of grub and lilo don't have that limitation.
HTH,
-D
--
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
Philippians 4:13
http://dman.ddts.net/~dman/
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