Partitioning

[Kenneth Porter]

On Tue, 09 Feb 1999 10:19:02 -0200, Juan Carlos Castro y Castro wrote:

>Kenneth Porter wrote:
>> 
>> I'd recommend one partition for swap and one for everything else. The
>> only reason to further partition would be to insure that the boot files
>> remain below the 1024 cylinder boundary.
>
>But doesn't LILO handle this too? I've never had any problem with kernel
>upgrading, no matter how big/full the HD is.

LILO, because it uses the BIOS for disk access, only handles files that
lie completely below the 1024 cylinder boundary. With geometry
remapping in the BIOS, this can still encompass most of an 8gb disk,
but it's machine-dependent. If you have a large disk, you should create
a small /boot partition at the beginning of the disk just to hold the
kernel and related files needed to get the disk drivers loaded. This
insures that LILO and the kernel can reach any file needed before the
disk driver is available. Once the kernel starts using the disk driver,
the BIOS is no longer needed and the 1024 cylinder restriction no
longer replies. Therefore everything else but the swap and /boot can be
on one large partition.

So on a small disk, you can have just a root and swap partition. On a
large disk with more than 1024 cylinders, you need /boot, root, and
swap.

BTW, there's a good discussion of this in
file:/usr/doc/lilo-0.20/README (RH5.2 distribution).


Ken
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