[vox-tech] Three Install Questions

[Peter Jay Salzman]

Hi Wilson,

Would appreciate it if you could set your line wrap to under 80 chars/line.
I have mine set to 76.  Some people advocate less to allow for threads to
display nicely.

On Fri 18 Feb 05,  7:00 PM, Wilson Shealy <wtshealy at comcast.net> said:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I'm in the middle of converting my dual boot XP/RH9 box into an XP/Suse 9.2/Sarge box and I have a couple of questions that I hope someone here can help answer.  The first is probably easy. The other two may not be.
> 
> 1.  Are there any disadvantages (except disk space) to having an oversized Swap partition?  I've decided to double mine so that I can double my RAM at a future date.
 
The RAM to swap ratio rule was from a very long time ago.  It was only a
general guideline for a time when system RAM was kind of smallish.  These
days, with system RAM being more plentiful than what it was, we don't need
to follow that guideline anymore.  If you read that in a book, the book is
outdated.

However, what is true is that it's best to have a swap partition on each
physical disk (I don't know how that translates to LVM, but I assume it's
still true).  And don't forget to set the priority of each swap partition
equal to the same value.

> For the other questions you need some background.  I have one hard drive dedicated to XP and another to Linux.  This was the same setup I had before with XP/RH9.  In the past I would copy the boot sector from the Linux disk to the root directory of my XP install and point the Windows bootloader at it.  This way I could maintain all the trappings of my factory XP install (ugh!) on the 1st disk and use it to "boot" the GRUB bootloader on the linux disk.  
> 
> For some reason, this boot method doesn't seem to be working anymore.  The only two major changes that I can see are that I've moved from EXT3 to Reiser on the Linux disk and that I don't have a seperate partition for /boot as before.
> 
> 2.  Could the use of the Reiser FS be somehow tripping up the boot method?

Hrm.  Dunno.  It should work, I think.  I don't think the details of the
filesystem have anything to do with the boot process.  The boot loader is
fairly ignorant of filesystems.  I'm not a grub guru, but I think that's
true for grub as well as lilo.

If I understand modern win32 OS's, they put the nameless generic first stage
bootloader in the MBR, and rely on the "bootable" flag being set on the
partition.  The partition itself contains the secondary boot loader.  At
least, this is my understanding.

If that's correct, then grub or lilo would happily live in the MBR, and the
XP loader will happily live on the partition.  That's how I have my
linux/win2k dual boot system set up.

> 3.  I have a fairly new computer (~2yrs) and was under the impression that I wouldn't need a separate partition for /boot.  Was that an incorrect assumption?  Since I intend to put Sarge on the same drive, it would seem cluttered to have two /boot partitions in addition to two root partitions.

Your assumption wasn't wrong.  I still keep /boot a partition out of sheer
habit.

Good luck,

Peter

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