Fewer partitions are better (Re: Disk Layout/Partitioning Practices)

[Matthew Miller]

On Thu, Jan 29, 2004 at 12:49:48PM -0500, Mark Mielke wrote:
> So that if you corrupt /, you minimize the chance of ruining your boot
> images (GRUB/LILO + Linux) making it difficult to recover. Actually,

In my experience, if / is corrupt, you're going to have a really hard time
booting regardless of the state of the kernel images. A rescue CD is
probably in the cards no matter what. So I don't see this as a very strong
argument.


> If you use a file system (for /) that supports 'tail-packing', or a
> file system not supported by GRUB, or an unsupported file system that
> doesn't store the boot image together as a single series of blocks
> with LILO, you may be _forced_ to make /boot a separate ext2/3
> partition. You may not be able to boot otherwise.

Sure, reasonable for special cases.


[snip]
> If you do it all on one partition, you have very few choices.

At the expense of more administrative overhead and potentially wasted disk
space. It's an endless debate. :)


-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>