Getting rid of /boot

[Daniel B. Thurman]

Marc Wilson wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 1:24 PM, Robert Nichols
> <rnicholsNOSPAM at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>   
>> This sounds like you've been doing your installs from a Live CD, where
>> your options are indeed quite limited.  The installation CD set or DVD
>> includes a perfectly good partitioning tool that allows you to set up
>> partitions and mount points pretty much any way you want, and also
>> allows you to switch to a text console and run 'fdisk' if you need to
>> rearrange an existing partitioning scheme.
>>     
>
> Exactly.  I've never seen any use at all for live CD's, I don't know
> what Fedora includes in one or even if they include any sort of
> partitioning tool at all.
>   
I have found that if /boot is not created, a change within caused
"MBR" to be relocated and and will not boot.  So, I stuck with
that model.  However, perhaps using lvm, this may not be an issue
but I will stick to what I know and can control completely being an
"old hat". ;)

For me, gparted is quite useful for multiboot partitions.  I have created
15 partitions (3 primaries for windows, and 12 logical partitions for
boot-master, swap, Fedora9/11/12, other distros, LinuxApps, NTFS Apps)
and it works well.  Note: boot-master is the primary grub "master" that
sees other the "slave" boot partitions for each linux distro.

The real snag about gparted is if you resize and move partitions
afterwards, you can get into wierd "gotchas!" where gparted fails
to correctly resize/move logical partitions and leaves 8MB of
unallocated gaps due to 'rounding to cylinders' and it is sometimes
impossible to recollect (with gparted). But that is just an annoyance
and it does not seems to hurt anything AFAIK and I don't know for
sure, if this affects pre-upgrades or anaconda, in this case.

Another major pain of gparted is if you delete and create a
partition "in the middle", gparted seems to assign this new
partition within to the highest  available partition number,
"down shifting" all partitions above it, and ends up creating an
"out of sequence" partition, which causes pre-upgrades/anaconda
to barf.  If you do this, you have to delete all logical partitions
above "the deleted middle partition" and rebuild these partitions
from another disk or from backups. I tried this for myself and
discovered this quite painfully and posted this observation some
time ago (about gparted quirks).

So what I do,  is to create 15 partitions and do not delete any
logical partitions "in the middle", seems to be good personal
rule (so far) and you can still resize/move/reformat the drives
and it seems to work.

When after having the 1st drive done in this way, and later adding
a 2nd drive, gparted is useful when creating a "backup drive" for
whatever reason (my case was a failing drive), from which I can
dd (or ddrescue, or ghost backup/restore for windows) to the 2nd
drive and it works.  I have found however using rsync/cp/tar/... one
is recommended to SeLinux relabel and even so, there were other
problems, (which I will decline to mention because it is too
numerous and obscure) and I found that dd/ddrescue works
perfectly (or in case of sector errors, ddrescue if you are lucky) -
so I believe rsync/cp/tar/... does not preserve file attributes, but
this is my general observation, having done this for myself.

FWIW,
Dan