How to get the most out of HD space.

[Les Mikesell]

Dave Ihnat wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 06:56:34PM -0700, Aldo Foot wrote:
>> I've always wondered about having separate / and /boot.
>> After all one cannot function without the other.
> 
> There are, as has been mentioned, historic reasons for this.  But also--you
> can't boot from a software RAID array, so in that case /boot is a simple
> partition.  In simple mirroring configurations, I usually go ahead and
> create a /bootsav partition on the other drive so the partition tables are
> the same--it makes maintenance easier, and with a simple cron job provides
> an on-system copy of the /boot partition if you have to switch to the other
> drive.

You can put /boot on a raid1 partition and the boot loader will treat 
either mirror as a normal file system and boot from it.  You may or may 
not be able to make the 2nd drive boot automatically if the primary 
fails because it will depend on how the bios handles the bad drive, but 
you can always reconfigure it and fix up grub by booting a cd in rescue 
mode.  The thing I like about software raid1 is that if your machine 
melts to the point there there is nothing working but a single disk, 
you'd be able to plug that into any compatible controller and recover 
the data on it.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com