Disk partitions

[Liam Proven]

On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 9:29 PM, MR ZenWiz <mrzenwiz at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 11:17 AM, Jorge Gusmao <jorge.m.gusmao at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi there,
>>
>> Can someone please explain the basics of disk partition necessary for a
>> ubuntu installation?
>> What is the best way to do it and witch kind of partitions (primary,
>> extended, system...) are necessary?
>>
>
> It depends on what you want to do.
>
> I usually put /boot, / and /home in separate partitions because I find
> it easier to do certain kinds of recovery that way.

Recovery of a downed PC these days means booting a full distro from
CD. There's no need for /boot, /sbin and all that kind of thing any
more, really, and I for one would like to see Ubuntu's simplification
and modernisation efforts do away with them.

>  Wherever you put
> /boot *must* be a primary partition,

Not true. Never has been, in fact; even 17-odd years ago, when I
started using Slackware, LILO could boot from a logical drive in an
extended partition.

Please do not distribute information without fact-checking it first.

> all the others can be whatever
> you like.

*All* partitions can be primary /or/ logical; Linux does not care.

Microsoft's DOS- and NT- family OSs must boot from a primary
partition. Linux and OS/2 don't care. The BSDs, Solaris and various
others can't be installed in logical partitions at all.

> Some people prefer a single / partition that also contains
> /boot, most people prefer putting /home in a separate partition.

In the mid-1990s, many PC BIOSes could only boot from the first 1024
cylinders of a disk (~512MB), or a little later, from inside the first
8GB. Thus, if you had (say) a 10GB or 20GB root partition, and after
an update the new kernel ended up toward the end of it, bang, your PC
would suddenly stop booting and there was no easy way to repair this.

So, the recommendation was to put a small (<32MB) /boot partition
early on the drive, inside the first 8GB, and keep the rest of the
system in a root filesystem elsewhere.

However, this is no longer necessary. Few PCs that old are still
around and anything that natively supports SATA is definitely no
problem.

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
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