On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 07:26:02PM +0000, Brian wrote: > On Thu 22 Jan 2015 at 13:31:36 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: > > > On Thursday 22 January 2015 09:42:13 Gary Dale did opine > > > > > > 50G for swap?! > > > > The partitioner that sets this up previously setup a bit over 2x the > > memory, 18Gb for swap, then surveyed the system and found 2 more swaps, > > dutifully adding then to the /etc/fstab it wrote. So at that point I had > > nearly 50Gb of swap available in 3 pieces/drives. > > "dutifully" means d-i did what you told it to do. You could tell it not > to use some partitions. You can even tell it how much swap to use. > > You haven't a clue what you are doing when you are partitioning, have > you? > > [Snip] > > > Removing the boot partition removes the guarantee that boot related files > > will be within reach of the bios. However, 50Gb is out of line as I have > > been using 1Gb for years, which has all sorts of cruft I haven't used in > > yonks in it. So I'll likely fix that and slide the rest of it back out > > before I put another install disk in the optical drive. > > I wish I could understood this; particularly the first sentence. BIOS has numerous limits on how far into the disk the first sector can tell it to jump to find the OS. If the first sector tells the BIOS that the bootloader is beyond what the BIOS can address, then the computer is unbootable. One solution to this is to have a small /boot partition near the start of the disk to hold the bootloader files. The bootloader can then use the full capabilities of the system to search deeper into the disk. Another alternative is to use an intermediate loader, store that in the pre-partition gap at the start of the disk and then use that to find the full bootloader. This is what grub does. Stage 1 is the BIOS-limited first sector. Stage 1.5 is stored in the ~1Mb gap before the first sector and Stage 2 is stored in /boot. As a result, grub can, in theory, boot a single-partition OS, even if the /boot files are several terabytes down the disk. > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@lists.debian.org > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org > Archive: [🔎] 22012015191626.e039c412814d@desktop.copernicus.demon.co.uk">https://lists.debian.org/[🔎] 22012015191626.e039c412814d@desktop.copernicus.demon.co.uk >
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