Paritions to install Ubuntu

[Tony Arnold]

On Wed, 2006-09-27 at 15:57 -0400, Colin Kern wrote:
> On 9/27/06, Mateusz Drożdżyński <m.drozdzynski at gmail.com> wrote:
> > That's what I have on my 80GB HDD:
> >
> > 512 MB ext2 /boot (system cannot boot from XFS partition)
> > 1 GB swap
> > 12 GB xfs / (quite big, but I store my pbuilder environment here,
> > about 10 GB should be ok for an averabe user)
> > 64GB xfs /home
> >
> > Having a separate /home partition gives you the ability to reinstall
> > your system without having to care about your configuration/data.
> >
> 
> I understand the advantage to having / and /home on different
> partitions, but what is the function of having a /boot parition?

If you are using LVM for / and /home, then you need a separate partition
for /boot as this cannot be in a logical volume.

If you want several Linux systems available from the same grub menu,
then having a common /boot and separate partitions for / can be an
advantage.

Historically, I think there were issues with boot loader not being able
to find boot images that were too far away from the boot record, and so
a separate boot partition position close to the start for the disk was
required. I suspect this is no longer the case with modern hardware.

If you only ever want one operating system on the disk, then it's
probably not worth the effort of a separate /boot partition.

Regards,
Tony.
-- 
Tony Arnold, IT Security Coordinator, University of Manchester,
IT Services Division, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL.
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