Bios freaks

[Les]

On Mon, 2007-08-20 at 18:14 +0930, Tim wrote:
> On Sun, 2007-08-19 at 18:52 -0600, Karl Larsen wrote:
> > I have heard a thousand words a week about LVM and it never made the
> > point that it moved /boot close to the near end of a hard drive.
> 
> I haven't heard about that happening.  It's always been my experience
> that if you used the install routines to prep your drive, that it made
> the /boot partition the first one.  I don't know if that's coincedental,
> but it would be a good thing for it to deliberately do.  Other
> partitions get shuffled about, though.  I don't know the reasoning
> behind it (if there is any).
> 
> e.g. If you had created /boot/, /home/, /tmp/, /usr/, /var/, in that
> order, you might find that at the end of your manual intervention, it
> actually created the partitions in another order, albeit with /boot/
> being the first partition.
> 
> Of course, thanks to how drives fake their number of heads and
> cylinders, to accomodate how BIOSs (and IDE?) are still terribly poor at
> handling large drives, there's still no guarentee that all of the first
> partition is going to be where the BIOS can access it.
> 
> > I HATE LVM. 
> 
> Me too, but for other reasons.  It's quite painful to try to recover
> files from it if it screws up.
> 
The partitions never move once created.  The data however moves each
time it is written, because the operation sequence writes the new
version to available space on the disk, then the old file is either
moved to a backup version or deleted depending on the application, or
application preferences the user has selected.  When a file is modified,
it is actually rewritten to the disk.  This is what causes it to move.

Regards,
Les H