[PLUG] Why create a boot partition?

[Keith Lofstrom]

> Date: Sat, 04 Oct 2003 05:36:24 -0700
> From: Brian Quade <serendipity at pobox.com>
> Subject: [PLUG] boot partition???
> 
> I have Red Hat 7.3 installed on one system and am playing around with 
> installing Debian 3.0r1 on another system.  Red Hat always recommends 
> that you create a boot partition but I can't find any explanation in any 
> documentation about the benefit of booting from a seperate partition. 
>  Debian's installation guide discusses various partitioning schemes, but 
> I haven't found any mention of a boot partition.  Does anyone know of a 
> good reason to boot from a seperate partition, or why this seems to be 
> only a Red Hat idea?

A separate boot partition can be small, which means it will boot with
old BIOSes.  One of the really cool things about Linux is that it
bypasses the BIOS for normal operation, so you can put a 120GB disk on
an ancient machine that only supports 1GB directly with the BIOS.  
This is true for GRUB at least, I assume LILO is as smart.

If you have a modern BIOS, or use a small disk, this is not an issue.
But I imagine RedHat got enough support calls that were "fixed" by 
using the separate partition that they made this a general recommendation.

I follow this recommendation when I put Linux and Win4Lin on old
Thinkpad 560 laptops; those only support 8GB disks natively, but will
happily talk to a 40GB or larger with Linux.  With Win98 running on top
of Win4Lin, you get a Windoze machine with more space, running faster
(ext2 is better than fat32), rapidly "rebootable", and back-uppable.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom           keithl at ieee.org         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs