Various pre-install queries from potential user

[John]

Martin Maney wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 30, 2004 at 12:35:48PM +0800, John wrote:
> 
>>Making lots a partitions like that ensures there's lotsa nothing between 
>>useful somethings and so increases seek distances, impairs performance.
> 
> 
> Are you sure?  It may depend on the filesystem, but if I remember
> correctly one of the things that ext2 has long done to try to avoid
> fragmentation is to intentionally disperse files across the multiple
> groups of blocks it divides the partition into internally.  It seems
> likely that this will be true of any filesystem that can avoid
> fragmentaiton without a substantial houskeeping effort (defrag as you
> go or in occasional bursts).

I know OS/2 does spread data around (HPFS) in bands. I don't know how 
Linux filesystems do it, but doing substantually the same thing would be 
no surprise.


Whatever it does, the filesystem architects have surely done what seems 
right to them.

Creating lots of partitions, I think, is likely to defeat any 
optimisations they've designed in.

The Ubuntu default is not altogether silly:-)


>>I recommend having grub in the boot record of your SuSE /boot partition; 
>>I suspect U is going to overwrite the one in the MBR unless you're expert.
> 
> 
> I think there must be a choice presented even in non-expert installs,
> because I'm 99% sure I didn't use expert when I installed on the
> Inspiron, and I would remeber the carnage very clearly if it had
> overwritten the MBR on that machine.

Do don't say what else is on that machine. If it's Windows, then 
overwriting the MBR is okay because the standard DOS MBR loads the boot 
record out of the active primary patition.

Grub and LILO both can do that.


> 
> Then install the other Linux systems with grub in their partitions. 
> This works fine on primary or secondary IME.  You do need a little
> manual work to setup the master menu for the partitions, and, as usual,
> if you don't install Windows first it will probably hose the MBR loader
> when it gets its hands on it.  ;-(
> 
> 
>>Use ext3. I think there are probs with xfs and reiserfs if you want grub 
>>in a partition boot record.
> 
> 
> So use ext2/3 on /boot and whatever you like for the rest.  For what
> was originally a hack to work around stupid limitations of PC BIOSes,
> /boot sure is useful.  :-)
> 

I was deliberately not specific: it doesn't matter which of 
{h,d}d[a-d]a{1,2,3,4} the boot record's in, and the partition doesn't 
have to be /boot (or even Linux!).

There's about 8K of space in there on a UFS (Darwin) filesystem.

That said, the partition used for /boot is a fine convention to follow.