Getting rid of /boot

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Sat, 2009-12-05 at 19:30 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: 
> On Saturday 05 December 2009, Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> >On Sat, 2009-12-05 at 12:33 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
> >> On Saturday 05 December 2009, Wayne Feick wrote:
> >> >On Sat, 2009-12-05 at 11:30 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
> >> >> Folderol even.  My objection to LVM is two fold.
> >> >>
> >> >> 1. It won't allow one to save things in the /home tree when doing an
> >> >> upgrade or re-install.  I have an almost 10GB corpus of email, and
> >> >> several scripts that are needed for my daily operations that need to
> >> >> be preserved.  LVM makes that impossible.
> >> >
> >> >Can you elaborate? I use LVM on all my systems, and whenever I move to a
> >> >new Fedora release I carry the old /home tree forward to the new
> >> >installation.
> >> >
> >> >Wayne.
> >>
> >> And just how do you do that?  The last time I tried to save /home,
> >> anaconda would not proceed until I checked the format it box.  As I'm an
> >> alpha test site for amanda, the recovery was doable and was done, but
> >> what kind of twisted reasoning gives anaconda the right to demand I
> >> destroy my data?
> >
> >Well, nothing (unless it's on a partition that has to be formatted for
> >an install, like /).
> >
> >And I've never had that problem.  If /home is a separate LV, in
> >Anaconda, select the PV with the /home LV inside it.  You'll have to
> >reset the mount points for all the LVs (an annoyance, to be sure, that I
> >wish could be fixed), but you don't have to format /home (or /opt,
> >or /usr/local, etc.) if it is a separate LV (or if it's on a separate
> >partition).
> 
> I also tried that once, and convinced it I didn't want it formatted, about 
> FC6 I think.  It bought it I thought, till I found it had made a /home 
> directory on /, the proceeded to write the new /home with its defaults.  I 
> took a bit of detective work to ascertain that my /home partition still 
> existed, but wasn't ever used and was not in /etc/fstab as a separate entry.
> Dumb was NOT my comment when I found that.
> 

There's always a /home directory on the root filesystem.  If you have a
separate /home filesystem, the /home directory on the root filesystem is
the mount point for the /home filesystem.  If the instruction to mount
your /home filesystem on the /home directory is not in /etc/fstab, it's
because you didn't set the mount point for that filesystem (whether it's
a partition or a LV) during installation.  (Not that it's clear you need
to do that during installation...  If you know *nix filesystem
structure, you know what's needed, but if not, it's not clear how you
find out.  I did a fair amount of reading when I first installed RHL
3.0.3!)


-- 
                Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs