Alternative booting

[Les]

On Sun, 2007-08-19 at 13:04 +0100, Chris Jones wrote:
> > I put it all into one partition. The multipartition setup wa sintroduced
> > to me as an advantage solely when one wants to remove/replace sections
> > of the system or is forced to do so when using small drives. As neither
> > is the case for my setup I didn't bother with it. I also never know on
> > how large to make those partitions. Will a 100M partition be big enough?
> 
> Putting your /boot as a simple directory under / is never a good idea. I'm 
> sure this is your problem and not problems with grub itself.
> 
>  Depends how many kernels you want to be able to keep at once. As a guide I 
> currently have 3 kernels in my /boot, and its using 20M of space. That means 
> 100M is good for roughly 15 kernels - Usually more than enough for anyone.
> 
> >
> > > The fact that you find grub broken only after updates is odd. Note that
> > > the point of a separate /boot is to make sure all the files needed by
> > > grub are at the start of the drive, where the bios can access them. If
> > > you don't do this then what might happen is files get written to grub
> > > that reside in parts of the drive that cannot be read at boot time, hence
> > > problems. This could also explain why things work for the first install
> > > but then break after updates.
> >
> > Which is interesting as other OS don't have that problem. At least W2k
> > doesn't. 
> 
> Actually it does. Its just users don't often stumble over them so often.
> 
> Chris
> 
And if you get a disk analyzer and check, you will find some files in
Windows that cannot be moved, and some of those are hidden at least from
the casual user.  I don't remember all of the bits, but there were a
great many originally, but as people pointed out that they needed to see
and work with some of these files, Microsoft has slowly been
relinquishing its iron hold over some of them.

Regards,
Les H