On 8 Oct 2012 00:07, "Tim" <ignored_mailbox@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Tim:
> >> Not really a good idea, but most particularly not keeping boot
> >> separate. Nothing wrong with the other stuff being on one partition,
> >> you just need to make the change carefully.
>
> Daniel Landau:
> > There's no reason why you couldn't keep everything on one partition.
> > One possible reason could be having an ext2 boot partition and
> > something more exciting for the rest, but I don't think my problem is
> > with booting off ext4.
>
> Everything but boot can easily be in one partition, but there's one very
> good reason that boot *may* *need* to be in its own partition at the
> start of the drive: Some BIOSes just can't read far enough into a drive
> to start booting up. And what may seem to work, at first, may fail
> later on, as newer files (needed to boot the system) get written further
> into the drive. Such as when you install new kernels.
>
> So, it (no boot partition) could well be a cause of a failure to boot,
> though I'm not sure what sort of error message you'll see when that is
> the problem. I'd expect some sort of file not found error, though.
>
> I like partitioning the installation, so that should a drive error
> happen, or the system does a check when it thinks there may be one, it's
> a lot quicker to check a small partition than one huge one. Not to
> mention that a file screw-up in a non-home partition is far less likely
> to screw up personal files. And having a separate home partition makes
> updating a lot easier: You can update a system, and keep personal files
> in place. My current preference for a minimally partitioned system is
> boot, /, and home. If I were doing more partitions, or spreading across
> drive, I like separate var and tmp.
>
> Other people see other advantages to partitioning: Such as different
> file systems, or mounting options, for different partitions, more
> optimum to that part of the system.
>
Thank you for your thought out answer. I did know about some of the issues, but learned also new stuff, e.g. the bios thing was new to me.
> I have, in the past, moved partitions like you've done. Copied the
> files to the new location, unmounted the old partition. Generally it
> worked without any dramas, other than remembering to set permissions
> correctly on the tmp directory. Sometimes a relabelling may be needed,
> depending on how you copied/moved things over. But you'd need to be
> able to boot up, first, for that. Again, you'd get a different kind of
> error message than you mentioned.
>
> Moving boot requires more than just copying files, and changing
> pointers. There are bootloaders in the partitions.
>
I did update the grub config and reinstall it to the MBR.
> How did you do the copying? With a file manager, the command line, done
> as the root user?
I did a "cp -a" as the root of a Fedora live USB boot.
Daniel Landau
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