Mike Accetta wrote:
Bill Davidsen wrote:
Gabor Gombas wrote:
On Fri, Mar 02, 2007 at 09:04:40AM -0500, Mike Accetta wrote:
Thoughts or other suggestions anyone?
This is a case where a very small /boot partition is still a very good
idea... 50-100MB is a good choice (some initramfs generators require
quite a bit of space under /boot while generating the initramfs image
esp. if you use distro-provided
"contains-everything-and-the-kitchen-sink"
kernels, so it is not wise to make /boot _too_ small).
You are exactly right on that! Some (many) BIOS implementations will
read the boot sector off the drive, and if there is no error will run
the boot sector.
But if you do not want /boot to be separate a moderately sized root
partition is equally good. What you want to avoid is the "whole disk is
a single partition/file system" kind of setup.
Actually, the solution is moderately simple, install the replacement
drive, create the partitions, and **don't mark the boot partition
active** until the copy is complete. The BIOS will boot from the 1st
active partition it finds (again, in sane cases).
I never have anything changing in /boot in normal operation, so I
admit to using dd to do a copy with the array stopped. No particular
reason to think it works better than just a rebuild. After the
partition is valid I set the active flag in the partition.
I gathered the impression somewhere, perhaps incorrectly, that the active
flag was a function of the boot block, not the BIOS. We use Grub in
the MBR
and don't even have an active flag set in the partition table. The
system
still boots.
Now that you mention that, I have been doing the active bit thing since
pre-grub (possibly pre-lilo) days, so it may not be effective with grub
in the MBR. Something to add to my list of "when I'm bored and want to
try something" list. Thanks for making the point.
--
bill davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
CTO TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979
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