[ale] RAM and Harddrives

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 10:34 -0400, Greg Freemyer wrote:
> The secret will be to install a boot partition in the first part of
> the disk.  If you don't need windows, etc., then just make your first
> partition be a 1 or 2 GB boot partition and you should be golden.

Oh, how I love the world of PCs with BIOS.

When I started using GNU/Linux systems in 1996, a lot of computers of
the time were limited to an insanely small part of the disk, for the
purposes of reading the drive via calls into the BIOS.  There was the
1,024 cylinder limit, then there was the 8 GB barrier, now we've a
128/132GB barrier.

Greg is correct in that Linux talks to the controller without the aid of
the BIOS.  You only need a very small /boot partition to be near the
beginning of the disk, and everything else can be anywhere you want.
So, you can have a 200 MiB /boot, and then any other partitions that you
want.  My system currently looks like this:

mbt at zest:~$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000cedc5

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1        2432    19535008+  83  Linux
/dev/sda2   *        2433        2493      489982+  83  Linux
/dev/sda3            2494       38913   292543650   8e  Linux LVM
mbt at zest:~$ 

/dev/sda2 is my boot partition in this case (I have /dev/sda1 empty in
case I want to do something silly like try out ReactOS again in the
future).  My boot partition is 500 MiB, but I have often found that to
be excessive.  Only 20 MiB is actually in use on that partition.  You
also get the advantage of being able to host a lot of kernels for
different systems on one single partition, and have a shared GRUB
configuration, and all of that, if you have a separate /boot and like to
boot into multiple systems.

	--- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch                                   mike at trausch.us
home: 404-592-5746, 1                                 www.trausch.us
cell: 678-522-7934                       im: mike at trausch.us, jabber
Ubuntu Unofficial Backports Project:    http://backports.trausch.us/

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