On 8 Oct 2012 00:07, "Tim" <ignored_mail...@yahoo.com.au> wrote: > > Tim: > >> Not really a good idea, but most particularly not keeping boot > >> separate. Nothing wrong with the other stuff being on one partition, > >> you just need to make the change carefully. > > Daniel Landau: > > There's no reason why you couldn't keep everything on one partition. > > One possible reason could be having an ext2 boot partition and > > something more exciting for the rest, but I don't think my problem is > > with booting off ext4. > > Everything but boot can easily be in one partition, but there's one very > good reason that boot *may* *need* to be in its own partition at the > start of the drive: Some BIOSes just can't read far enough into a drive > to start booting up. And what may seem to work, at first, may fail > later on, as newer files (needed to boot the system) get written further > into the drive. Such as when you install new kernels. > > So, it (no boot partition) could well be a cause of a failure to boot, > though I'm not sure what sort of error message you'll see when that is > the problem. I'd expect some sort of file not found error, though. > > I like partitioning the installation, so that should a drive error > happen, or the system does a check when it thinks there may be one, it's > a lot quicker to check a small partition than one huge one. Not to > mention that a file screw-up in a non-home partition is far less likely > to screw up personal files. And having a separate home partition makes > updating a lot easier: You can update a system, and keep personal files > in place. My current preference for a minimally partitioned system is > boot, /, and home. If I were doing more partitions, or spreading across > drive, I like separate var and tmp. > > Other people see other advantages to partitioning: Such as different > file systems, or mounting options, for different partitions, more > optimum to that part of the system. >
Thank you for your thought out answer. I did know about some of the issues, but learned also new stuff, e.g. the bios thing was new to me. > I have, in the past, moved partitions like you've done. Copied the > files to the new location, unmounted the old partition. Generally it > worked without any dramas, other than remembering to set permissions > correctly on the tmp directory. Sometimes a relabelling may be needed, > depending on how you copied/moved things over. But you'd need to be > able to boot up, first, for that. Again, you'd get a different kind of > error message than you mentioned. > > Moving boot requires more than just copying files, and changing > pointers. There are bootloaders in the partitions. > I did update the grub config and reinstall it to the MBR. > How did you do the copying? With a file manager, the command line, done > as the root user? I did a "cp -a" as the root of a Fedora live USB boot. Daniel Landau
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