On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 09:55:17PM -0700, Bogdan wrote:
> Another potential solution that I have not seen proposed - GRUB could create
> its
> own partition in order to reserve space.
We do this - well, we expect that the user or the OS installer does this
- on GPT, as it's obviously the right and proper thing to do there. On
MBR, it's unfortunately mostly impractical for a couple of reasons (the
first is the most important, though the second does come back to bite
you):
* The BIOS can often only read from relatively near the start of the
disk, and core.img must be readable by the BIOS. If some other
operating system is already installed - the common dual-boot case,
and the case where this problem is overwhelmingly most likely to
matter - it's likely to occupy a large stretch of partitioned space
right after the boot track.
* The MBR format has so many irritating restrictions on primary
partitions that the more partitions an operating system needs to
create by default, the more stress we put on partitioning
algorithms. (Most people don't notice any of this until they try to
install on a machine whose OEM helpfully created three or four
primary partitions already.)
--
Colin Watson [[email protected]]
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