Complex hard drive partitioning

[Alan McKinnon]

On Thu, 2006-07-06 at 06:45 -0700, Gary W. Swearingen wrote:
> Alan McKinnon <alan at linuxholdings.co.za> writes:
> 
> > /boot is about 4000% more than what you need, 100M is normally
> > enough :-)
> [snip much more]
> ...
> 
> Sounds like good advice, Alan.  But I'm wondering why so many folks
> even have a /boot partition these days.  I thought the 1024 cylinder
> limit went away a long time ago.  What's the problem now?

Several reasons to have a separate /boot:

- don't mount it on an enterprise machine, then no-one can install a
trojaned kernel
- when /boot is mounted, it can be mounted with options that don't apply
to the rest of the filesystem
- two or more distros share a common /boot (like I do)
- /boot can be mkfs'ed with something light like ext2 which lets you get
into it and fix it from a rescue media like a small usb drive

I've needed all of the above, and all of them more than once

> Seems like the OP will have to be careful that his two OSes (Gentoo
> and Ubuntu) aren't bothering each when sharing a /boot.

It's not hard, just keep each distro's stuff in separate dirs. I have
a /boot/gentoo and a /boot/ubuntu, and periodically move updated kernels
into the correct dir and edit menu.lst as appropriate

What the OP should do (I forgot to mention it) is to install his new
Ubuntu grub onto the boot sector of /, not the MBR, then chainload
Ubuntu from the grub that gentoo installed

alana